Oh, you've heard? I think I heard you hearing, because everywhere I turn there's superficial, salty analysis saying how bad it is for the iPhone 11 not to have 5G.

Wrong. It's the current 5G deployment that's bad.

And by 5G I mean the real, next generation mmWave flavor. Not the "more LTE+++ Sub 6" or the in between version almost no one ever mentions.

mmWave is meant to be incredibly robust and incredibly fast. The fast part is starting to show up in a very, very few places in a very, very few test markets.

So few, and so not-robust yet that, if you step, turn around, or maybe even sneeze through the stream, you lose it.

Worse, the early generation 5G radios being crammed into phones right now lack real integration, necessitating multiple radios for The frequent LTE fallback, require RF transparency on four of the six sides of a device, impose frustrating engineering constraints, and still run super hot and heavy.

Like Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal needing an ice pack to prevent her test phone from melting from the heat.

Which means, even if you think 5G will have terrific coverage everywhere you go, and have killer, compelling use cases, you won't want to use it with one of the current generation of devices.

Unless you want to be part of the early test pool, and paying handsomely for the privilege of 5G is legitimately your next big purchasing driver, you should save your money and buy a far more mature 5G phone in a couple years, if and when the current issues are all ironed out.

I say "if" because mmWave isn't a certainty. It's not HSPA or LTE. There's a chance it won't be everything everyone is hoping it will be. That deployment will prove too expensive and problematic. That it won't become the next big consumer cellular solution and instead will be relegated to broadband use in high density areas or something similar.

In other words, that it'll become WiMAX. (Sorry Sprint customers. So sorry.)

That's why Apple isn't engaging right now.

The same reason they didn't rush to put 3G on the first iPhone and waited until iPhone 5 for LTE.

An iPhone-scale deployment would utterly overwhelm any current 5G network, which is why carriers manage this stuff so carefully to begin with.

The most Apple could do at the moment is make a limited quantity of iPhone 11 5G variants using the current generation of essentially test chips for the limited test markets.

More expensive, bigger, uglier, more compromised variants with little long term value for customers and none of the strategic or financial ROI of the Verizon iPhone 4 way back in 2011 - something that rolled out in massive numbers on a massive, mature network and radio technology.

And no one, no one who doesn't want to short Apple stock, work in network testing, or who just feeds off negative attention wants that.

Certainly not Apple or their customers.

The one cable to rule them all. That was and is the promise of USB-C. In large part, it's delivered. From the single USB-C port on the 12-inch MacBook, to the two or four hybrid USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 ports on the MacBook Pro (2016 and later), to the iMac Pro, Apple is including the interconnect on all its recently updated computers. But not on iPhone or iPad, where Apple has stuck to its own, proprietary Lightning connector.

That's a stark contrast to the rest of the mobile industry, where USB-C has become almost standard on phones and tablets.

Why didn't Apple use USB-C instead of Lightning?

That one's easy. There was no USB-C back in 2012 when Apple shipped Lightning on iPhone 5. It didn't exist. The spec wasn't even finalized until August of 2014.

Why didn't Apple just wait for USB-C, then?

Assuming Apple could count on USB-C being finalized and shipping without any further delays, it would still have cost them years and literally made everything from iPhone 5 to iPad mini and iPad Air impossible to ship the way Apple wanted to ship them.

Let's rewind. When the original iPhone was introduced, it was with a 30-pin Dock connector. That was a proprietary connector Apple built for iPod back in 2002, but iPod was so popular and ubiquitous, and the 30-pin so capable for its time, that it was more of a feature than failing.

As the years went on, though, and the 30-pin Dock connector became increasingly outdated, Apple needed something better. There's only so many times you can rewire pins for new connection standards like HDMI, and engineer around something as massive as the Dock connector, after all.

And, back then, USB was still a mess. There was standard USB-A, miniUSB, and microUSB. The latter two especially offered advantages of size, since they were tiny and tinier, but that wasn't enough. Apple wanted something modern, something that could carry them another 10 years, not just a stop gap they'd have to replace and then replace again.

So, years before USB-C was even a glimmer in nerd's eyes, Apple began work on Lightning. It was designed to be symmetrical and less frustrating to plug in, purely digital, so it could adapt to new standards and be more future-proof, and tiny so Apple could build the next-generation devices they wanted to build.

And that didn't just include iPhone and iPad. It included everything from Magic Keyboard to Siri/Apple Remote.

What about now, though? Could iPhone be switched to USB-C now?

Apple can do anything with iPhone it wants, including switching it to USB-C any time they want. There are a few things to consider, though.

1. USB-C is physically bigger than Lightning. It's not a lot bigger but when you're fighting for every millimeter of space, bigger is the opposite of better. (Just look at how vendors like Samsung have to shove the port off-center just to get it to fit below the screen.) Apple didn't ditch the 3.5mm headphone jack to to waste that space on USB-C. Here's a diagram showing the difference, rendered by Josh Flowers:

2. USB-C is a standard which, while more open and compatible, is also less flexible. With Lightning, Apple can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. That means, if some cool new technology emerges next year, Apple can implement it immediately without having to wait for a standards body to to come to an agreement ... or not ...
3. USB-C would require another port change for customers. Many people weren't very happy with the last one, and Lightning was 10 years after Dock. It's only been 6 years since Lightning. And in that time, with hundreds of millions of devices on the market, Lightning has become ubiquitous enough that everyone has it, typically in abundance.
4. We're moving into a wireless era. Rumor has it Google has already considered ditching the USB-C port in the Pixel. It may not be long until charging, at least for phone-sized devices, is purely through inductive Qi pads, and data is purely over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

So, USB-C would have to offer considerable advantages for Apple to want to go through another connector transition, both internally and for customers.

Wouldn't convenience be a considerable advantage?

It would! But it wouldn't be more convenient for most people. It would be less.

Personally, I would love USB-C everywhere. It would mean I could travel with just USB-C cables and not have to care which device needed charging when. And if I lost or damaged one cable, I could just use another without a second thought to what type it was.

But I'm not everybody and I'm certainly not most people. In fact, I'm the only one in my extended family that has USB-C on anything. When you leave the tech-niche and go mainstream, most people have very little USB-C still and a lot of lightning, and making them switch connectors again would be the opposite of convenient.

Isn't Lightning just a way for Apple to control accessories and tax accessory makers?

Apple certainly enjoys control and is good at making a profit. On the other hand, when you look at just how problematic USB-C was at launch, in terms of defective and destructive cables flooding the market, it made some level of control and quality assurance beneficial.

There'll always be knock-offs, and online retailers have to do a better job about preventing their sale, but no human should ever have to worry about a cable destroying their device or causing property or personal damage.

What about the other end? Shouldn't Apple include Lightning to USB-C in the iPhone box?

Yes. This. I'm of the opinion Apple should have switched to Lighting to USB-C cables in the box last year, if not the year before, and included a USB-A adapter in the box the way it included a 3.5mm headphone adapter.

Apple typically pushed the future hard. It needs to keep doing that while always easing the transition for customers at the same time.

So, TL;DR, will iPhone ever go USB-C?

The Lightning team at Apple helped build USB-C, which is why there are so many similarities and why Apple has gone all-in on it for the Mac. Whenever, if ever, it makes sense — and is worth the transition cost — for iPhone and/or iPad, we'll see Apple go all-in on it there as well.

There could also always be new standards: microUSB-C could be a thing one day. If and when it lines up right, I'd love to see it. If only so that we really, truly, have one cable to rule them all.

But, my guess is the next big switch for iPhone won't be to USB-C, it'll be to completely wireless. I don't think Apple will be the first — just like Apple wasn't the first to delete the 3.5mm headphone jack — but I think it and everyone else will get there within the next 5 years or so.

Guests & Links

• Sebastiaan de With: Twitter, Webite, Halide
• Linda Dong: Twitter, Lyft
• Marc Edwards: Twitter, Website, Bjango apps
• Brad Ellis: Twitter, Website

Sponsors:

• Mint Mobile: Voice, data, and text for less. Get free first-class shipping with code VTFREESHIP.
• Thrifter.com: All the best deals from Amazon, Best Buy, and more, fussily curated and constantly updated.
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Transcript

[background music]

Rene Ritchie: I'm Rene Ritchie. This is "Vector". Vector is brought to you today by Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile works just like your traditional wireless service, but it is ridiculously inexpensive.

For example, you can get five gigabytes for three months for just $20. You can also get, right now with this special offer, free first-class shipping on any Mint Mobile purchase. All you have to do is got to mintsim.com and use promo code IM Free Ship. That's I-M-F-R-E-E-S-H-I-P. Mintsim.com, free first-class shipping on any Mint Mobile purchase. Thank you, Mint Mobile.

Today's episode is a good old-fashioned, iterate-style, designer roundtable. Who better to help me kick that off than Marc Edwards, my former co-host on "Iterate". How are you Marc?

Marc Edwards: Howdy, it's been a very long time. It's good to be back.

Rene: I know. This was long past due. Also joining us we have the fabulous Linda Dong. How are you, Linda?

Linda Dong: Hello. I'm good.

Rene: Brad Ellis. The legendary Brad Ellis.

Brad Ellis: Hello.

Rene: How are you, Brad?

Brad: How's it going?

Rene: The man almost as famous for his cameras and motorcycles as he is for his designs, Sebastiaan DeWith. How are you, Seb?

Sebastiaan de With: Hey, Rene, how's it going?

Rene: Good. I wanted to get everybody together because Apple has done something new. They do that from time to time. Once in awhile they like to throw you curveballs like Retina or sized classes. Not boring, right, Linda?

Linda: [laughs]

Rene: Who likes boring? This time we have iPhone X. It's got several unique characteristics of it, so I thought maybe we could break them down and hear how you guys are tackling design issues. I guess we'll start off with the top. That is the horns. I know some people call it the notch and some people call it the ears in the forehead.

I have to imagine that Craig Federighi was walking the walls of Apple for a long time just throwing those iPhone X horns. I want to respect that. Linda, what did you think when you saw the horns and had to start thinking about designing for them?

Linda: [laughs] I was actually kind of excited, to be honest. I actually really love quirky hardware features and designing for them. I was pretty into it. I know one of the main HIG guidelines, the human interface guidelines, as treat it like it's not there.

Immediately when the phone came out, I think a bunch of designers got out and did little explorations where its scroll bar would hug the edge of the hardware and do cute little animations like that. I love it. I love the fact that the status bar have a place to be that isn't in my design, which is great.

Rene: For people who aren't familiar with your background, you worked at Apple. You worked on projects like the Apple pencil. Do you feel more of a responsibility to skew towards the HIG? Or do you just pick and choose as you wish?

Linda: This was interesting. I actually worked on this camera.

[laughter]

Linda: I thought in all of its bulkiness, before it actually got slimmed down to this form factor. Now that I've left Apple, I do very much respect the HIG. My job when I was back at Apple was to ignore the HIG and look for different, interesting ways of being able to solve for little hardware corks like this. It's a little bit of both, would be the answer.

Rene: Really a lot of debate, Marc. There were people, the minute they saw this, "Why didn't Apple make the bezel go all the way across? Why didn't they fill in those pixels with luscious OLED black? Why are they owning these horns?

Marc: I'm certainly in that camp. I think the iPhone 10 is itself an iconic iPhone design. It's going to be remembered very well. It's a near-flawless device, but for me it's the way they've handled the notches. My first option is probably the politest way of saying it.

I actually haven't used one yet. Prior to this podcast or just by sheer luck, I was able to reserve a pickup today. I had an order that was placed minutes after the orders opened, but hasn't shipped to me. Was able to reserve one today. I actually have...if you can hear this, this is...

[paper scrunches]

Marc: That's the wrapping.

Rene: [jokingly] That's Brad's bag of candy and booze.

[laughter]

Marc: I haven't actually opened it yet. I haven't seen them. I can open it on the show maybe in a minute.

Rene: Nice and boxed. Did you feel similar?

Brad: No. I guess before they came out, you see it in the pictures. It's all you see, especially when it filled with colored liquid. You really see that notch when you're looking at a press photo of it.

When I'm using it, I think because it's not...when they made the screen taller, we didn't get any additional ergonomic area. It was not like John did the push buttons all the way up to the top, and I'm not anymore now. I don't care about that.

Then I think because the angle of view is so much broader vertically, that it becomes past my desire to care. It starts entering my peripheral vision by being so far up at the top that I just don't even notice it. I don't know. I don't care.

Rene: That struck me because I didn't really get to see it in renders because I was live blogging the event. You can't really pay attention when you're busy typing. It's like it goes in your ears and out your fingers, and you have to watch it again later.

My first experience was actually picking it up and holding it, and it struck me as almost being like Apple Watch. It was like this extra peripheral area where you could put interesting but not critical information without it getting in the way of your center vision.

Brad: That's how I feel. Seb, you've got an app that really embraces those two top areas.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, it was kind of perfect for us. We kind of started designing around it. This was for an app called Halide. It's a little camera app. Even before the thing was actually out there, there was kind of leaks that showed the front panel with that notch. A lot of people were like, "Oh my god, this looks terrible. It's going to be horrible."

[laughter]

Rene: Notch-pocalypse.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, Notch-pocalypse, if you will. I thought, "Hey, maybe we can put some stuff up there," because we actually don't have to display the status bar, which definitely makes it a lot easier. My first response was like, "I think this is probably going to be fine."

It looks kind of futuristic and cool. I have a few Android phones that have slim bezels. I'd take this over a slim bezel, honestly. I really, really like having all the corners. I like that. It looks pretty sweet.

Brad: That's actually, like the rounded corners seem like more of a thing you have to design around than the actual notch. You don't have to fill it with content, but, yeah, having those rounded corners really means you can't...

I notice your histogram in there. The black bar has to get clipped a little bit. You've got like a slider on the right side. It gets clipped a little bit. That seems more of a thing to consider than what to do with the center part.

Rene: Totally, yeah, or the ergonomics of the bottom with the home bar. You can't put anything there. There may not be a notch there, but you can't put anything meaningful under where the home indicator goes.

Brad: Absolutely. You did move down your camera, your shutter button. It's lower than it is on a 6 or a 7 whereas like...

[crosstalk]

Brad: ...camera app, they didn't move it. They left it in the same physical spot.

Rene: Yeah, it's basically a letterbox iPhone 6 camera. It's kind of crazy. We might still adjust that.

[laughter]

Rene: It doesn't feel perfect ergonomically right now, for sure.

Linda: Yeah, I think the biggest that I've been struggling with design-wise has been just constantly maintaining this idea of the kind of like save area now. The edges are a little bit off limits on the entire phone, so that's where I've been struggling because I do tend to put in like full bleed controls.

It's almost like designing for the Apple TV in a way, where you can't put UI elements at certain corners of the edge. I think we're dealing with the same thing here now.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, this is definitely phone over scan. That's what you're talking about. It's over scan and safe areas like '80s title production and stuff. It's similar issues. I think my problem with this is I do like the look of the device and I do like the giant rounded corners.

The notch, yeah, I haven't used one yet. As I've said, I've just got my phone today, so I've got no idea. I haven't used it yet. Haven't opened the box. I think the main concern I have isn't that the hardware isn't great, because the hardware is amazing. It looks good.

It's more just that a lot of the hardware choices have ended up as software difficulties, as things that we have to account for. There's a really wide range of these items that have been pushed on us with the iPhone, and certainly recently. We've got the notch, the home indicator area, the rounded corners.

The status bar with iOS 7, obviously, now the status became part of the app. It wasn't a system thing that you didn't have to worry about. All of a sudden you had to design the status bar. Previously you didn't have to.

The screen dimensions, I even feel like from the iPhone 6 the screen dimensions have got a whole bunch worse, like the 375-point wide isn't divisible by many values. It's divisible by five, and that's pretty much it. It's almost like you're dealing with prime numbers sizes, whereas 320 was divisible by 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16, 32, 64.

I feel like Apple really could have changed that value to make it a nice number that works for computers and for designers and not necessarily have changed the look of the end hardware. I think on the icon size the IOS icon size is another example where there's 13 different Unix sizes. There's one that's 83.5 point for the iPad Pro 12.9-inch home icon. Just decisions that, to me, feel...

They don't necessarily make the hardware worse. The hardware is probably has good as it could be, but they make the software require more effort for developers and designers. That ultimately means that experienced developers and designers have to put in more effort, which, again, may or may not be a big deal on a sort of per future basis.

If you look at from the point of view of people getting started out, there are so many things you have to consider. I feel like that wasn't the case with the original iPhone. I think a lot of these things were just so right that they just weren't as much of a big deal as they are now. It's a bit of a shame.

Brad: Yeah, I judge every release by what did Apple give me and what did Apple take away. In terms of with iOS 7 it was like, "Well, fuck, now I have to redesign everything." Apple looked dumb now. I have to put in all this effort just to stay afloat. I feel like that was a detriment to my applications.

Whereas other releases, then, it feels like I get APIs or whatever. There's sometimes where Apple just, they share lock a whole app or they share lock a whole segment of PDF scanning or whatever. Sometimes I try to think about it like that.

Linda: They gave us 20 percent more screen, which is fantastic.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, for sure.

Rene: Some people are doing really interesting things with horns. I think on Twitter, Seb, you bought up Apollo, the Reddit app, which puts the volume slider right in the top left.

[laughter]

Sebastiaan: I feel like that's a think a lot of people are really frustrated with Apple about, that it keeps overlapping your content. I thought it was really clever putting it up there and well using it. Obviously, it wouldn't work system-wide. I think people wouldn't even notice it, but for people who are fairly tech savvy, that's a cool solution for it for sure.

Marc: Does the digitizer work over the notch? I think it does. Taps go through, is that right? Obviously...

[crosstalk]

Linda: I think that's the home area that touches go through. I think the physical hardware on top of the notch. I don't know. I don't think so.

Sebastiaan: You can tap it to scroll right back to the top. I don't know if that's just because multi-touch fields, some people think that they're just constrained to the phone, but as far as I know they radiate. Different companies do different things. I think Nokia and Samsung famously let you do hover actions or glove actions in the multi-touch field where Apple usually uses it for finger mapping.

I think because that field is resonate, you can get away with certain things like tapping it to scroll back to the top of the screen, but I don't know if it itself is actually capacitive.

Linda: Yeah, because as far as touch, we would be able to feel you on the edge, so it might be using that.

Rene: Now Mark's going to make me press the damn screen.

[laughter]

Rene: I might.

[crosstalk]

Brad: Yeah, I think it's really generous.

Rene: Yeah, I'd say...

[crosstalk]

Brad: ...like a two pixel or whatever, four pixels on the bottom of the notch that lets you scroll to the top. It can tell that you're doing that or something.

Rene: I was going to say it should be easy to work out if you had a friendly developer. We should be able to see if touches go through. As far as I know, and I don't know for a fact, but I thought the digitizer itself was visually pretty much transparent. Right? It could sit on top of the camera hardware possibly. Who knows? I guess we'll have to test it and see.

Brad: I don't know if any of you do client work anymore, but is this something that people who do, do client work are going to be faced with again, like they had to do the iOS 7 redesign? They had to do the size classes. They had to do the new look, and now they're going to be expected to...

Or just even independent developers, people like you, Seb, they're going to be expected to do these redesigns. No one pays for apps for anything anymore, so you've got to put all this time and effort into doing these sorts of just keep-up-with-the-hardware redesigns?

Sebastiaan: Yeah, I saw some app store reviews already of people who were like, "I can't believe this wasn't even updated for the iPhone X. It takes like a few hours to do, tops."

Brad: You check a box.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, exactly. There was actually a big Reddit thread about this. "I am an app developer, and I consider anyone who hasn't been ready on day one for the iPhone X, their apps are dead. They're abandoned. It's so easy to do." I'm like, "Says who?" That's a gross simplification of it. It's definitely going to be...

You know how bad it was when they went from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 5 or when they added the 6 plus?

[crosstalk]

Sebastiaan: Mm-hmm, it's going to be that much worse.

Marc: The 4 to the 5, everything was pillerboxed for a long time. I think some apps still are.

[laughter]

Sebastiaan: Your bank app is still...

[crosstalk]

Marc: Bank apps. [laughs]

Brad: That one was my hardest one because I had all these assets that just assumed a screen height. Then I had to go back in and reproduce assets or whatever, use the clone tool to make it go a little higher.

[laughter]

[crosstalk]

Sebastiaan: I think you're right. That was the biggest shock. That was the point where it went from being kind of like an app console where it's all very, very, very restricted, and, as you said, it's exactly the same and you can make all kinds of crazy assumptions. Whereas now it's like, "No, no, it has to be incredibly responsive."

We've got two apps we're working on updating for iPhone X, and we've got another new app we're working on. So far it hasn't really been that hard, but we're kind of lucky in that we've got a toolbar and nav bar areas that really...

The simple way to do it is just to expand the area. There's been a couple of other tweaks, but thankfully the UI is not too custom in that respect. It's actually been pretty easy.

We knew we were going to have the hardware really soon, so we just wanted to make sure we could actually test it properly before we ship something.

Rene: How are you guys treating the home indicator area? I've had a lot of different experiences. Some apps have stayed completely clear of it, so when I swipe sideways, for example, to app switch it's not a problem. Others have just continued the interface down there. Once in a while I hit the app interface instead of the system-wide interface.

I think the rule for home indicator is you can keep going forwards and backwards as long as you don't interact with the app, but the minute you do that it resets what the primary app is and you can't switch forward. You can't go back to where you were before anymore.

We've seen people on Twitter. I have this saying called hot comps, which is like a hot take but for apps. Apple puts out the horns. Immediately people who aren't designs on Twitter just go, "Make it all black," or, "Put emoji underneath the home indicator." What is all this wasted space?

[laughter]

Rene: Brad, I saw you tweeting that sometimes you just let space be space.

Brad: Yeah, oh my gosh. That's always the joke, right? It's like, "Make the logo bigger. Fill up that white space." You don't have to always do that. You can just let it be there. That's why I was saying ergonomically you don't get any more screen real estate here. You don't have to put buttons there. They're really hard to push.

Lyft, actually, Linda's project here, they made that set pick-up button, and that did actually move down a little bit. It's a debate. How far do you put that down? I don't think it should go all the way down and touch the home indicator button at the bottom.

Linda: It's interesting that you bring that up because for that specific CTA we did end up moving it down, but we kept the general proportions of that button because it looked freaking crazy when you extended it all the way down. We also, in the current app, have larger full bleed buttons which just could not...

The banding that happens if you don't extend that color down, if you don't extend that hot pink or that gray down, it just looks terrible. It actually looks better when we did end up enlarging the button. I can't say that I think it's the most beautiful solution in the world, but I think it will lend itself to buttons that don't go full bleed.

Rene: It's funny. Lyft was actually, I think, the first app I used on iPhone X. I picked it up. I installed it. I went downstairs and had to take a Lyft back to my hotel.

Linda: [laughs]

Rene: My experience was I noticed the apps that hadn't been updated, but I didn't notice the ones that had been updated because they just filled the screen and looked totally normal.

Linda: Good.

Rene: What's your take on the subject? Halide, you have both the benefit and the drawback of being a camera app where you have a set viewfinder and controls around it. Is there value in pushing it to the edge? Is there a value in respecting the safe areas?

Sebastiaan: Yeah, it's tricky because we haven't really figured out how to address landscape properly. We can do some clever stuff with the years, but that kind of screws you on landscape. So far, our attitude has been most of the time you'll be using it only briefly, so it's not too bad.

Yeah, there's a lot of things you have to think about ergonomically that are just super different. The safe guys are not just making sure that UI doesn't end up in the wrong place or interferes with system gestures. It's also like your thumb can only bend so far when you hold it.

Rene: [laughs]

Sebastiaan: I'm not happy with our current layout. I want to move some stuff up and different because I found that what I thought was perfectly cromulent placement of controls is now just absolute thumb gymnastics and that it totally have to change. Stuff can look good on launch day and still be literally quite a stretch.

[laughter]

Brad: Can you throw stuff into those areas that are not frequently used but you don't want to hide behind some sort of altered state?

Sebastiaan: Yeah, I'd say that's perfectly possible.

Brad: I've been trying those gymnastics. I used an iPhone plus for years until I got iPhone X. I would balance it on my pinky. I felt like Bullseye from "Daredevil," just flipping it around like a card all the time.

Now I'm learning all these new gymnastics because you have to be able to reach the top to pull down control center, or you have to use reachability, which is right at the bottom, to get it halfway down.

Marc: Reachability is impossible to use.

Brad: [laughs] It's an accessibility feature.

Sebastiaan: I just figured this out. I used think you had to throw the app all the way up and then down. It turns out you just have to do that little gentle swipe, just a little poke down.

Brad: Yeah, it is a whole new interaction. Marc, have you been thinking about that too, just the way that gesture area works and how it would fit in with how your app behaves?

Marc: I think, like Seb, it needs a lot of exploration. I don't think probably anyone has got it right yet. It's going to take a little bit of time. Like Brad, for now we're just letting it breath. Again, we're lucky the apps that we have generally have a fairly stock-ish toolbar. There's not really much we have to worry about.

Certainly, I don't like it when the highlight state goes all the way through the home indicator. I'd rather keep the toolbar area actually to be itself. Right now, we're not really using that for anything because I'm worried about the concerns with reaching it. The years are certainly a good place for showing data like status data.

Obviously, status bar is good up there, but if you've hidden the status bar, I think it's good for showing information that are not necessarily things you want to reach to. I think maybe the home indicator is probably good for that too.

[music]

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[music]

Rene: Linda, when you're just looking at it, does it suggest to you that we might need to reassess...iOS, famously it's always been a very top-centric navigation. The tab bars are at the bottom, but a lot of the back buttons and other controls are at the top, even when devices got much bigger.

Are we getting to the point where you as an app designer and Apple, maybe, as a platform owner has to start thinking about how these tall screens work with the limits of human hands? [laughs]

Linda: Oh, most definitely. I think in terms of my point of view, the bottom of the screen is sort of where it's at right now. I don't even really...Especially with the swiping for control center, taking up that top right corner and then the lock screen on the top left, I sort of assume that that whole entire area is sort of off-limits at this point.

I'm not a firm believer at all of that top left close button that has been such a paradigm that everyone has used. I think that needs to be in a different place. I'm looking at our...I get to say this now. Lyft is working on a complete redesigned we just shipped to one percent of our users.

We have that top left corner, and I'm trying to reach it right now. It is impossible. I am going to drop this phone onto my laptop right now.

[laughter]

Linda: That is something I am going to complain a bit tomorrow.

Marc: Where would you put it? I'm actually going through a similar issue with an app, and I'm trying to keep, as much as possible, the navigation on the bottom portion of the screen. Would you try and put that bottom left or something?

Obviously, there's the swipe. Generally, it can be pulled down or pulled from left to right to get back. How would you address that?

Linda: One thing that we've been trying is doing a little bit more of like an asymmetrical design for Lyft. We actually have a floating action button on the right-hand corner. That's like the forward button. I assume that maybe we can play around with having some sort of back button in the same general area.

If you play with the current Lyft app, we have a back button, and it actually kind of lives in the center of the screen. I can't say that most apps can do this, but we have the map which takes up the majority of our screen real estate and sort of this floating panel on top of it that is lower so that people can actually reach it.

We've taken the solution of putting that back button right above that panel. I think that's a fantastic location for it. A lot of other apps I see out there, they're full screen. They don't get this type of nice architecture that we do. It's definitely going to be difficult. I would say the back button gesture has bene a lifesaver.

I've had a plus for a really long time. It's either use the back swipe or I actually use my left index finger to kind of hook around the top of my screen. It's really weird, really weird to look at.

Rene: [laughs] The generic back swipe that used to take you between apps is gone. The 3D touch app switcher gesture is gone. Everything is sort of top and bottom loaded now, at least on the system side.

Linda: Yeah, that's a bummer.

Rene: What interested me was the keyboard is not at the bottom. It's not bottom justified. They sort of left the keyboard where it was. If you would fill in underneath the keyboard with black OLED, it would look like the bezel on the bottom of a standard iPhone.

Obviously, Apple did enough testing to know that putting a fine-grained control, something that you have to basically type on, would not be comfortable or functional for a lot of people.

Marc: I think that was a smart move. I do think that was the right choice. As Seb was mentioning, you need to be able to reach down there. Typing quickly is difficult. It's totally fine to have a bit of space there. That's OK, especially if it actually works better.

[crosstalk]

Brad: I like it too because it's the same now between the apps that haven't been updated yet, so they're still in letterbox. It's in the same spot.

Sebastiaan: That's cool.

Brad: I don't have to look at the keyboard to type. I can do it without looking. I got to like inherent that muscle memory without having to relearn.

Sebastiaan: That's a good point. That's a really good point. It doesn't change anything about your relative finger position on the phone.

Rene: Yeah, and consistency is a user feature, if you can provide people with a similar experience. We talked about this before, but humans both hate change and hate to be bored. You always have to find that balance where, like a movie sequel.

It's similar but different enough that you think it's a new movie, but not so different that you can't relate to it anymore. You guys faced a lot of similar challenges.

Marc: Yeah, it has to change, but not that. Don't change that.

Rene: Like a "Simpsons" episode. It has to end up back where you started. [laughs]

Sebastiaan: Yeah, just look at Twitter right now with the new character count. Oh boy. I'm not sure if you guys have seen the tweets of the developers of Twitteriffic and Tweetbot, but they alternatingly get user feedback of "add 280 characters or I'll never use your app again" or "if you add 280 characters I will never use your app again." [laughs]

Rene: Just add a setting for everything, a setting for everything. Then you pick the default and no one will ever change it.

Brad: Yeah. [laughs]

Rene: One of the other super interesting things here, Marc, is this is not just a DCI-P3 display here anymore but HDR. Does that change the way you design at all? Do you have to think about the color space differently, how you do UI elements, or how you present your app differently?

Marc: I think generally most people won't have to worry about the color space stuff at all. When you're designing for most apps, you should be working in sRBG anyway. If you're building a camera app or a photo editing app, then I'd say you definitely want to support DCI-P3, but generally I think as long as you've got good practices I don't think this display changes much.

Apple's displays have always been amazingly well calibrated, best in class displays on everything, on their Macs, on their phones, on their iPads. I haven't seen it yet. Like I said, it's in the box. I've got the box here. I haven't opened it. Here we go.

Rene: [laughs] You have such restraint.

Marc: I know it well. I don't want to make noise.

Rene: Blame it on Brad.

[laughter]

Marc: I haven't seen the display. I've seen macro photos that you've taken. I've seen all the reviews of it. I'm sure it looks fantastic. Really, the HDL stuff matters for content, for video. Display P3, it can matter if you want for apps, but you can really mostly ignore it for most types of apps and just the normal best practices should stand.

The OLED is a little bit different in that, obviously, as you mentioned, contrast and blacks are a little bit different. They're a lot better, and motion is a lot better. Again, I don't really think...I've seen a whole bunch of comments floating around. People are saying we need to redesign our dark mode and need to change this.

I don't know if I believe that. It is nice that when there's black areas the pixels just don't have any lights behind them at all, unlike LCD. That's cool, but I'm not sure I necessarily want pure black and white text or something. It's going to be probably a little bit too intense.

Rene: Brutal contrast?

Marc: Yeah. Basically, what we're saying is this display has more contrast. The response that I've seen from a lot of people is to add more contrast again. That doesn't make any sense. If you were going to counteract it, what you would actually do is make your dark UI lighter, if you wanted it to kind of look the same. Obviously, it's a little bit of an opportunity there, but generally speaking...

Rene: You can charge more for dark UI, Marc. We established that years ago.

Marc: Right. [laughs] We did, we did. I think dark UI is generally harder to design for, too. I honestly don't think this display changes much. Being OLED doesn't change much. Being PenTile doesn't change much or...

[crosstalk]

Rene: Do you remember when we had Seb on Iterate for the first time. Seb, you had to explain to us how you managed color on devices that had no relation to each other and complete different display technologies and balancing?

Sebastiaan: Oh yeah, it was awful. I'm so glad that it's just an amazing display. When I got this thing, when you first got it in your hands at that event, Rene, you were like, "It does have a PenTile like matrix." I was like, "No, it's going to be horrible."

Rene: Nobody knew. I asked everybody. We had jaded journalists. We had like the skulkiest, jadiest, pixel peeping journalists, and nobody realized it until I asked them afterwards.

[crosstalk]

Brad: The DPI is like 420, right?

Sebastiaan: Yeah.

[crosstalk]

Rene: ...their game is tight.

Marc: It's a weird concept, though. You're drawing your UI. You've got images, whatever you've got. You've got your felt.

[laughter]

Marc: It's weird to think that some of the pixels that you're sending to the display, the green is always there for every pixel, but for the red and the blue, the information is just completely ignored depending on which pixel. It's either ignoring red or ignoring blue. It just doesn't use it at all.

Because the display is so high DPI, I'm assuming, I haven't seen it yet, I'm assuming it just looks great. [laughs] I think they made some good choices here. I prefer this solution to the iPhone plus scaling. That seemed to me to be not so great. This is good.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, agreed.

Rene: Did you have to do anything differently to support OLED rather than LCD, Seb?

Sebastiaan: I think the one thing that really jumped out to me, it seemed fine, and I was like, "Oh cool, black is going to be black now." Then I used the app, and I was distracted by the amount of contrast that light elements on a dark background have now.

We already don't use full on black contrast in most places, but I think we're going to tone it down even more. It kind of screws with your photographic eye in that sense. It's nice to have pure black, but the contrast really is crazy.

Rene: At least you don't have to invent your own alti-alias thing like you did.

[laughter]

Sebastiaan: Apple is doing all that now, am I right?

Rene: Yeah. As far as I know it's just handled, right? If I developed for one of you, you shouldn't have to worry about what screen technology the device is using?

Linda: You mean on PDFs?

Rene: [laughs] Back in the day with Android devices you would pick how many you could afford to get in your sample. Then you'd test them in all of them and go, "This one is too green. This one is too red. This one is too blue. This one is PenTile. This one is RGB stripe. This one is whatever." You'd be like trying to find some way of supporting all of them.

It seems like, at least the apps that I used, even the ones that hadn't been updated, they still look like iPhone apps. The icons look like they did on LCD or on OLED. There were some minor differences, but nothing was oversaturated.

Nothing was drab or dreary. It looked like an iPhone to me, and I thought that was pretty cool from just a color-management point of view or a color-calibration point of view.

Marc: They just do a good job. That's really what it comes down to.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, exactly.

[crosstalk]

Rene: ...done a fantastic job making the display.

Marc: That's the whole point of color management, right? It's so that you can use different technology and you can have different input and different output and it will get as close as possible. If they've done their job, really this display, from that point of view, should be entirely boring. That's cool.

Brad: I was mad at someone, a client, one time because they had a Pantone color for their brand and then they had a different digital color. I thought that the digital color looked too incorrect, but they wanted me to use it.

I got the Pantone swatches out and showed them how, on the phone, the Pantone swatch is identical to the color on the phone. There's no need to have a different digital version of that. We can just use the Pantone color if it's for an iPhone.

[laughter]

Rene: Did you think about the color? You got a really vivid, bright pink in place, Linda? Did you think about the colors at all when Apple was switching technologies?

Linda: You know what? We did. I'm also going through just a huge color study independent of just screen, whatever they're using for color management on the screen. The thing I'm worried about is actually dark mode.

Lyft currently doesn't have a dark map, but I'm very curious to see how, especially using like a third party like Google, how that's going to read on this phone. If it is true, if the contrast is incredibly different with a black map on top of this black screen, then we'll have to do a lot of fiddling to kind of tone that down.

We're already doing fiddling to make sure that the text doesn't read as too black. We're never, ever, ever going to use pure black for text. That's going to be another kind of consideration. The hot pink itself, I think it's too hot pink already in our current map.

[laughter]

Rene: You can never be too hot or too pink.

Linda: We're testing things out in the real world and real-world scenarios, constantly taking Lyft rides at night. You just get that gigantic hot pink in your face. I just assume like...I haven't seen a driver yet with an iPhone X, but I feel bad for whoever is doing that right now. [laughs] Their eyes must be burning off.

Rene: It's funny because I asked about a night mode or a dark theme. Apple did it for the Apple Watch. Yeah, that's a really constrained display. They have one for Apple TV now because you don't want a huge bright interface if you're in your dark home theater. There isn't one for IOS. There isn't one for iPhone. There isn't one for iPad.

Apple has their first OLED iPhone. With OLED, if you go dark, if you turn off those pixels, you get really good power efficiency. If you go white, you get really bad power efficiency compared to LCD. Apple's thing was, "Well, you know, Safari is one of the most popular apps, and the Web doesn't care about dark. It's like all white with black text anyway, so the power saving would be minimal."

I think I would love this. You guys tell me if I'm nuts. I would love like a night kit or a theme kit where Apple would provide a framework and then developers would just tell it.

I know they have smart invert colors now, which is better than the old invert colors, but I think there's an opportunity there to have something like a theme kit where you guys could provide what you wanted and then people could turn on and turn off globally a dark mode or set it as a timer like they do with night shift so when the sun goes down it switches modes. I think that would be super interesting.

Linda: I'm all for that.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, I'd be super down with that.

Brad: I think that when you're doing anything like colors or whatever in the app, you should try to centralize that as much as possible and then adhere to all of the accessibility settings that are already there. We already have increased contrast mode.

If you have a central plist where you're defining all your colors, you can change them all during that or you can change them for grayscale. I noticed that the Apple music app, if you have grayscale turned on, the selected and the deselected color for the tabs is the same color. You can't tell what tab is selected.

If you had that centralized pList and you looked at the setting it was set on, you could actually modify that selected color to make sure that it stood out really well. In that way I think that people should already be doing the work to get toward if someone was to do that nighttime API.

I think we should already be headed toward that direction so you can switch that on when it does come out.

Rene: All those UI [inaudible 37:48] are underworked anyway.

[laughter]

Rene: Knock that out. It's a check box basically.

Rene: What are they even doing at this point?

[laughter]

Rene: Oh god, there must be a big pile of stuff on the desk already been sorted through for 12. "Yep, yep, nope, nope, nope." They should just machine learn it at this point.

[laughter]

Rene: When you look at this, Marc, are there opportunities when you go edge-to-edge that you wouldn't have considered when you were still in sort of like a big bezeled box?

Marc: Yeah, I think so. I think it really gets back to what Linda was saying about the safe areas. Previously everything was safe. You could use every pixel for whatever you want. It was all reachable, and it was all up for grabs.

Now we've got some areas of the phone where really they should only be for certain tasks. There's some things you can't put in there. You just can't. You can't assume that it's going to be on the phone, for a start, for people who aren't using an iPhone X. You also can't assume that they're going to be reachable. For different orientations there may be certain parts of the screen that are obscured.

I don't know. I think we just need to be super careful really, that's what it comes down to, and really think about the -- I can't remember what they call it, the layout, something, whatever, I can't remember what the order layout name for it is -- the safe areas. You just need to be very, very mindful of those when designing apps.

Rene: Does it make you want to create like a window mode where it completely fills the viewfinder and you just tap to take photos?

[crosstalk]

Linda: ...that I want.

[crosstalk]

Marc: ...right?

Linda: Yeah.

Marc: Yeah, that's probably one of the uses where you'd want to fill the ears with all the pixels.

Linda: I was just saying that to, I think it was Marc's point, I forget, AR mode-wise, I was hoping that they would have just replaced the entire background of the home screen with just your camera feed so it just looks a transparent piece of glass going through. I was really hoping that. [laughs]

Sebastiaan: That'd be cool.

Rene: You remember when IOS 7 came out and people were talking about how much that gaussian cost in terms of compute. [laughs] I wonder what that viewfinder...

[crosstalk]

Marc: ...one hour battery life, but that's all right. It looks cool.

Rene: That was the whole thing about transparent displays. I've been using some of the AR apps. There is still a bezel. There is still a frame around it, but it's so small compared to most other phones and you don't really have the heavy top or bottom, that it does feel almost like a window into a different world.

Sebastiaan: It's magical. You see it in the first promo video, right, the video where they show off everything the iPhone X is. Then there's Jony showing himself off as an animated pile of poo and that kind of stuff.

[laughter]

Sebastiaan: Right after that there's the thing where he shows the AR thing that's [inaudible 40:25] walking the basketball court. That just shows the case for not having a subtle little bezel or whatever. Apart from that notch, it just looks like a window, like a little frame of reality with the little bit of extra stuff overlaid on top. It looks super cool.

Rene: Have you guys thought at all about Apple is using attention awareness now for a variety of things including, if you want to, you can use that for face ID but also things like dimming alarms or dimming ringers when you look at it or not turning the screen off in iBooks because it knows that you're looking at it.

Have you thought about that at all, Brad, just using the face matching, the attention awareness, or any of those features in AR kit to create more personalized, more comfortable experiences based on how someone is looking or not looking at your app?

Brad: The first thing I thought of was that old, gosh, was it Samsung that had that Neil Patrick Harrison...

Rene: Oh, the scrolling?

Brad: No, it was the one where she looked up because some cabana boys were walking by. Then it paused the video that she was watching.

[laughter]

Rene: Yeah, they had two. They had when you moved your eyes out of the way it would pause the video. People hated that because they wanted to keep listening while they were looking away. They also had a thing where as you would look it would try to scroll with you.

Sebastiaan: Look to scroll.

Rene: I always got that backwards.

Linda: Exactly what you want.

Brad: Yeah, some of those it's like, let me look down at my kid for a second. I don't know, whatever.

Rene: I feel like at the top I've got read all over again.

Brad: Yeah, don't be too smart. That's sort of how I see those things. No, I haven't figured out what to do with it. I keep mulling over. What do we do with that attention concept? I haven't figured out any way to apply that yet. Has anybody else?

Rene: I can say like in Linda's app you could have...She knows you're not looking at it, so she doesn't bother to update the car very much. Then the moment you look at the screen, oh, that's where the car is.

[laughter]

Brad: I remember hearing someone talk about this years ago. Can you figure out if I'm mad by how fast I'm typing on the keyboard? Then based on that maybe don't send an update about how I need to update my software. Now is not the time just based on my keyboard presses or [inaudible 42:29] .

Rene: When 3D touch came out I really wanted that if I hit the keyboard hard it would auto all caps before it sent my message because I was obviously angry.

Sebastiaan: We're going to monitor and see if people are smiling and then throw up the "Please rate us in the app store" dialog.

[laughter]

Rene: People were creeped out by that idea. You guys have so...Not you guys, but there are certain companies that are really big on the data harvesting that sort of do a lot of assessment based on your interactivity already.

They measure the speed of it, what areas you're going to, what you're doing, what you're engaging with, all those things already. This could absolutely be that [inaudible 43:00] . I like to think that you guys are like the developers for good, like the Justice League of developers.

[laughter]

Rene: You'll think of all sorts of really cool ways of using it.

Sebastiaan: That's what we want you to think.

Brad: Yeah, [inaudible 43:12] man. Rene, I studied dark patterns really well.

Marc: You're both podcasting from hollowed out volcanoes.

[laughter]

Rene: Brilliant. Marc, have you thought about it at all? Have you thought about what you could do if you just know that someone is looking at your app versus the opposite?

Marc: I think it's awesome. I don't have any cool ideas that really relate to what we do just yet. I'm sure that it's one of those things where some good ideas will come out of it and they'll sort of propagate across all of the apps, but I haven't thought of anything just yet.

Brad: If my computer had it, I could see there being like a plug-in or whatever, a little applet that's like, "You need to look away from the screen, Brad. You've been looking at the screen for three hours."

[laughter]

Rene: I can feel your look.

Brad: Stand up.

Linda: Says Siri, "Stop staring at me."

[laughter]

Linda: Just to throw out an idea, something that I've always hated is honestly pinch to zoom. I think it's actually quite hard to manipulate a map, for example, using that. I've always wanted to just have...I'm always staring closer to the screen when I'm trying to look for something specific.

I was hoping that we could do some sort of thing where we could do some automatic zooming. I don't know how disorienting that would be, but I think that would be fantastic for when I just don't have two fingers to devote to getting fingerprints all over my screen.

Marc: Is that based on squinting or how close your face is to the screen? You'd kind of move your face closer and it would zoom in...? [laughs]

Linda: Yeah.

Rene: Could you just tell Siri, "Zoom, enhance. Zoom, enhance."

Linda: Exactly.

Brad: Linda, you should make that. I want to see it.

Linda: Cool, I will.

Brad: I'm interested to see if that would just like blow my mind or if it would be good. I've always had animations turned off. They just bother me. The one that always bothered me was the folder coming forward because I feel like it's going to hit me or something.

[laughter]

Brad: I don't know if the map thing would make me feel like I'm in a different dimension or if it would be really cool. I'm trying to imagine it right now.

Rene: You just turned off motion and you have all the cross fades on your phone?

Brad: I used to, yeah. When I got this iPhone X I didn't restore from a backup like I have for the last 10 years. I decided to start fresh and have to put my password in everywhere just to experience that pain. I have motion turned back on, and it's fun. I'm enjoying it.

Rene: You don't have TRISM on your phone anymore.

Marc: I just tried it. Reduced motion is super weird on the iPhone 10. It animates a little bit, and then it just fades. There's a little bit of both now. I was like, "How does that even work?" You see a little bit, and then it fades.

Brad: Oh, that's weird.

Marc: Yeah, it's not great.

Rene: There was an interesting comment from Jony Ive today in his interview -- I think was at "Wallpaper," I'm going to mess up the name of the magazine -- where he was saying that iPhone X is going to grow and change as the software does, that it's literally gotten to that incredibly Tabula rasa state where it's as close as possible to being a blank screen.

That means that it's going to be much more effected by the software. As the software evolves, I guess, as we go to iOS 11.1, 11.2, by the end of the year it might feel like a really different experience. Is that a good thing, Brad? I know we want progress, but is that also unsettling? Is that something that you have to start thinking about, making your apps adapt and change as we go forward?

Brad: I don't know. I don't feel like the fundamental things will change like swiping to make things go away, but reachability wasn't in the factory GM. I assume that there's a bunch of things that they meant to put in there and that's sort of what they're talking about. Apple Pay or the messaging Apple Pay thing that's coming soon. What else is in 11.2? Is there anything else?

Rene: Yeah, first person Apple Pay. I don't know. They're supposed to increase the capacity of the inductive charging so it will charge faster. There's a bunch of little things. They still haven't done the iCloud message sync. That got deferred. There's a few features that are still...

Brad: I really can't imagine them...They're not going to move the nav bars down. That's not going to come in like a point update. That's going to be a biggie. I don't know what else is going to change year-over-year that I will care about.

Rene: It becomes much more like a living object. I remember when iOS 11 came out on iPad. Nobody knew how to get to the split screen apps anymore because the process of doing it completely changes. There's no real explanation for it.

Brad: I thought that mine was broken because I was in beta. I was like, "I guess the beta version doesn't have it," so I just lived without it for a few months.

Rene: Then you learned you've got to swipe up, swipe up again. That's the sort of process where I worry about where you change enough that people just think it stopped working.

Brad: Do you remember when Facebook always had this campaign? There was a page that would be like, "Undo Facebook. Make it be the old wall again."

Rene: Google too.

Brad: Every time. It's like they're just going to change it every day. That's what I love about the old software release cycle of the yesteryear, which is like, "I'm ready for the new thing. I'm going to put the floppy discs in my drive, update my account." It's something new.

It feels weird nowadays to just be like, "I opened up Twitter one day and now the whole platform has changed because there's 280 characters."

Rene: Google has done a lot of that. They will update Chrome almost like a trickle update, constantly pushing new bits towards it. I remember people who did Hangouts, not like person-to-person Hangouts, but they brought the president on a Google Hangout.

They'd go to use it, and the button to start the Hangout would be gone. It wasn't really gone. It was just somewhere they couldn't find. The president is waiting. You've got to press that button. Just the idea that they couldn't count on an interface. They couldn't even choose not to update anymore. It was this living thing all of a sudden that wasn't always on their side.

Brad: "Where's the red phone?" "Oh, we're trying something new. I don't know. Can you find it? We're testing the effectiveness of this..."

Rene: Yell real loud.

[laughter]

Rene: What else have you been thinking out, Linda, when you look at iOS 11, iPhone X, and the idea that the hardware is changing again? Is there anything that particularly interests you going forward?

Linda: This is very superficial, but I really want to hide a little pink moustache underneath the notch that you can only see when you take a screenshot. That is my...

[crosstalk]

Sebastiaan: Oh my gosh. [laughs] That's amazing.

Rene: Can't you put it over the home indicator and just have the home indicator twitch like a moustache?

Linda: Yeah, but the point is it's hidden. I think what I'm always fascinated with is the sensor technologies that the phones are using. I think it's really interesting. I don't know what Apple plans on doing with releasing this to third parties, but now that we have the depth camera, this phone is an object scanner. It can scan objects.

I'm very curious to see what opens with those types of possibilities and how we can take advantage of that, being on the other side of it.

Rene: Yeah, you have all the AR possibilities as well. You could put that moustache on me as I'm going into my car.

[laughter]

Linda: Yeah.

Rene: What about you, Marc?

Marc: Yeah, the depth information is pretty cool. I don't know if you've opened up the imaging in Photoshop, but you actually get it as a separate channel. There's a whole bunch of cool stuff you could do with that. I'm very, very excited about that as well.

I'm really excited that the front panel of the white phone is now black. That's a good change. It now means I can actually venture out from getting a black phone, which I didn't do at the time.

[crosstalk]

Rene: ...you didn't like the white fronts?

Marc: No, not at all. Not at all. I think it's terrible. [laughs] It's just I find it so distracting, especially seeing the sensor housing. I just didn't like seeing the black dot for the camera and the speaker. I realize some people don't worry about that stuff and it doesn't matter.

I don't mind the colors. I don't mind the gold and the silver and everything else, but very happy there's a black front. It's very much like my favorite Apple phone, which is probably the white-back 5c, thought that was cool, good-looking phone.

Marc: That was awesome.

Rene: It was unabashedly good-looking.

Marc: It was. [laughs]

Rene: Does it make you want to experiment with anything, Marc?

Marc: Who knows? There's so many cool things coming every year in terms of the hardware and the software. If anything, I find it a little bit daunting. It's like you've got your mouth on the fire hose, and there's so many new APIs. Obviously, iOS and iPhones in general are at a very mature place, so a lot of the stuff we need, the meat-and-potatoes-type features, they're all there.

They've been there for years, so we generally don't find there's something in the way stopping us from making some software thing. Obviously, there's new stuff always coming, new hardware and IPIs to come with it.

It's hard to know which ones of those things we should be spending time on because as awesome as they all are it's hard to know which ones are a good fit. I guess we need to find some time to do a bit more experimentation.

Rene: Is that a thing, Brad, what you do with ARKits? Suddenly it feels like Ikea has to let you drop a chair into your living room whether it's [laughs] well-considered or not? It's just people are racing to use the new toys, and it'll take a while before you get the more considered implementations?

Brad: I feel like there's a lot of things in the world where each feature wants more features as a result. That's true as well for other third-party companies. That's why it's so burdensome sometimes when it's like, "Well, no. You have to make your app taller." Then it's hard for games where it's like, "Well, I didn't model any more of the building. Now I have to go back and do that again."

Every time there's going to be a new feature I feel like there will be a cascade of things that now must be applied to that. For ARKit I'm the most excited about right now we can only do flat flap planes, but I assume the next update will have walls they will let us do and then start to become more advanced.

I think there's going to start to be even more opportunity there where there's no excuse why any art that you would ever want to buy you can just imagine in your house already.

Rene: Seb, you were talking about the photography and what you're able to get out of a camera. Obviously, you make a photography app, but it looks like when you're in that you get the raw now. You get the depth data now. You can individually target cameras.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, and I think what's crazy about this device is that there's so much of these sensors that they're not even scratching the surface, even, of what the possibilities with them are. I only recently found out with some friends of mine that if you wear a helmet, like a full-face motorcycle helmet, Face ID actually still recognizes your face if you trained it enough.

It only needs a portion of your face, not even the entire face. The amount of stuff we can do with the sensors that are in this phone now is so much greater than what is being done with it right now. I think that's crazy, crazy exciting.

We're going to see so much stuff. Like Jony Ive said, this could look totally different in a year. All the possibilities of this device could be way beyond what we're currently having in it, and that's nuts. [laughs] That's awesome. It's intimidating.

Rene: It feels like a new beginning.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, absolutely.

Rene: It feels like we have these eras of iPhone. I still remember Marc leaving WWDC when they announced Retina, [laughs] and he was trying to do all the math in his head for the resources he'd have to spit out. Now, we've already got all these, again, like size classes and auto-layout. Now, we have these longer displays and dealing with the horns.

I wish the system could hide the home indicator. I know developers can do it and media controls can do it, but it [laughs] looks like it's staring at me after a while. It knows that I know what it does, but it still wants to look at me.

Brad: Did you notice you can tap it, and it bounces?

Rene: Oh, I didn't try that. There's a lot of playful interactions on iPhone X.

Sebastiaan: It's not bouncing for me. It just does that nice, satisfying...

[crosstalk]

Rene: Oh, it is bouncing!

Sebastiaan: It only bounces if there's nothing under it.

Rene: Oh, yeah! That's so cool.

Marc: Only if it's unlocked.

Sebastiaan: Oh, yeah.

Rene: Nice.

Sebastiaan: I like the...

[crosstalk]

Rene: It doesn't do any unauthorized bouncing.

Sebastiaan: Yeah.

[laughter]

Rene: No, I'm super excited. Linda, any final thoughts?

Linda: Final thoughts?

Rene: Yeah, for right now.

Linda: I'm playing with controls right now and how beautiful it is. [laughs] I guess this is a tiny, little thought, but I'm having a hard time. This phone reads to me as like a piece of furniture, in a way. I get a lot of very Danish furniture vibes from it.

[laughter]

Linda: The weight of these little squiggles, and all of the curvatures and everything. It makes you have to wonder whether you should be designing your UI to match the furniture that it's supposed to sit on top of.

My corner radius, for example, do they fit within this? I don't think they do. I don't think sharp edges look good in this type of form factor. I think that's what a lot of designers are going to have to think about.

You can't ignore the hardware anymore. I think it's very in-your-face, actually, ironically, for it being this window. I think people have to be a little bit mindful of whether their UI actually clashes with the form factor of the hardware.

Rene: It's aggressively inevitable. [laughs]

What about you Marc?

Marc: I'm with Linda on this. It feels like a bit of a reset and like this device is really quite different to what's been in the past, so if anything, I'm just being really cautious, and trying to feel out what the best solutions are, because it seems like a whole bunch of stuff we've been doing in the past may not work going forward, just very cautious, lots of experimentation.

Rene: I know Brad just wants to make live wallpaper and retire.

[laughter]

Rene: Just scoop up all the profit.

Brad: My biggest thing was that we went from a home button, which was a button that then caused the screen to do a task. It went from that to a direct manipulation of closing the app by swiping up.

It made me want to do more swipe-y things, and so I went to my prototyping tool, and I started making lots of little swipe gestures for all sorts of little crazy things. Then I found myself swiping in like a "Minority Report" kind of way in order to get...

I had to close it. I was in Twitter, I think, and I had to close a video, and so I swiped up, and then I swiped over to go back, then I swiped to close the app. I thought it was like, "Well, now I think I've gone crazy. This is too intense."

[laughter]

Brad: My final thought, I'm going to try to figure out what is the right balance of, "Should it just be a button or should it be a gesture, and how do you figure that out?"

Rene: It's interesting, because there is so many opportunities, like the basic gestures are so limited, and Apple's playing a little bit of games, like if you just flick up, you go back to the home screen, but if you drag up, you go to the multi-tasking browser, and if you pull left or right, but you don't want to get to the point...

I forget what it was, maybe it was a Blackberry 10 phone, where you would do, like you'd go across, and then diagonally down, and then across again, or something to bring up the hub. It started to feel like you were casting spells in a video game.

[laughter]

Rene: The level of complexity ramped up quickly. I think we're learning about the collisions, the dexterity of people, and how they can adapt to these gestures.

It reminds me a little of Web West. I know I'm not the first person to say that, where they had the cards, the stacks, and the gestures. It is almost like learning a touch-based language.

Seb, what about you, any final thoughts?

Sebastiaan: I think 10 years of iPhone UI design have been...There's been a big change around iOS 7, but it was mostly visual. If you look at things, it kind of changed the theme of things, not so much the structure and layout of things.

When Linda was talking about the work they're doing with Lyft now, and talking about a fast action button, which is very much an Androidian kind of thing, at least there's not very many people on iOS who use it. I think we're probably going to see the next, even just five years, changing a lot of what has been really standard UI controls and very standard UI paradigms on the iPhone.

The first thing being, obviously, the home button. Anything from buttons and the things with things that are laid out, and the metrics and stuff might be very much re-thought and changed the next 5 to 10 years, and that's pretty exciting. It's going to be a pretty crazy UI playground for the next couple years, until you try to figure out what's best for these crazy new phones.

Rene: It's interesting, because a lot of manufacturers are racing to get rid of ports now, not just the headphone jack, but all ports, and to get rid of buttons. Like some of the HTC phones, there's no buttons. You literally squeeze them.

We're also getting tactile interface, like everything from the Nintendo switch controls with the Ice Cube games to the things like 3D touch, and some of the music apps let you sort of feel keys here. We're still exploring all the voice interface. Now there's the camera that's reading us and can maybe start doing facial interface.

It's going to be interesting and exciting, to say the least.

Sebastiaan: Definitely.

Rene: Linda, if people want to find out more about you, if they want to follow you on the socials, if they want to see your good works, where can they go?

Linda: They cannot go to my website, but they can follow me on Twitter, @lindadong.

Rene: What about you, Marc?

Marc: I'm Marc Edwards on Twitter. That's Marc with a C, and bjango.com for articles and other stuff.

Rene: You have a slew of really good articles that have gone up recently.

Marc: Thank you.

Rene: Brad, where are you these days?

Brad: I'm on Twitter, Brad Ellis is my user name.

Rene: 280 characters of Brad Ellis.

Brad: Argh!

[laughter]

Rene: What about you, Sebastian?

Sebastiaan: That's a great title for a biography, by the way.

[laughter]

[crosstalk]

Sebastiaan: I'm @sdw on Twitter.

Rene: You guys have a bunch of apps in the app store, and I'll make sure they're all mentioned in our notes.

Thank you so much for joining me. I think it is a really fun new era of design, and I can't wait to be wowed by everything that you guys do.

You can find me @reneritchie on all the social things. Thank you so much for listening. That's the show, and we are out.

[music]

I originally wrote this article on January 31, 2017. Since then, Apple Watch Series 3 has shipped and the product has continued to grow. This fall, it surpassed Fossil, Rolex, and other incumbents to become not only the most popular wrist computer on earth, but the most popular watch period.

Now, following Apple's latest quarterly financial results — the best ever until the next — analyst Horace Dediu has made another, more important, observation. Wring on Asymco:

iPhone set an impossible expectational bar. Measured against it, nothing else on earth can be considered a success, including other legitimately successful Apple products, including Watch. But that's why smart analysis and savvy, contextually-sound reporting is key.

Apple Watch is strong and getting stronger. Continuing to frame it as anything else indicates failure only and completely on the part of the framer.

Original article below.

There's a strange narrative in the tech community concerning Apple Watch being a flop, a failure, or in some way, shape, or form, a disappointment. It's particularly bizarre given Apple Watch, as part of the wearable market, is doing record numbers.

From Tim Cook's opening remarks during the Apple's Q1 2017 conference call:

One of the hits on Apple Watch is that Apple doesn't break out numbers for the product the way they do for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Many companies provide no numbers on any products, Amazon being a prime example. Yet that hasn't prevented the very same tech community from pushing a very different narrative around Echo:

Neil's estimate for Apple Watch for Q1, as published on Above Avalon, was 5.4 million units. For context, that's the same number of Macs Apple sold over the same holiday quarter. It also puts total estimated Apple Watch unit sales at over 25 million to date.

It's not the iPhone business by a long shot — nothing is — but it's big enough business that any other company would sacrifice a C-level executive or two to get it.

Yet, the narrative around Apple Watch was so lost that when Google delayed Android Wear 2, vendors like Motorola/Lenovo exited the market, and Pebble sold itself off, hot takes tripped over each other claiming the "smartwatch market" might be dead.

Fitbit, which makes a wide range of fitness-focused wearables, also didn't face the same kind of pessimism from the tech community. Indeed, they were promoted as incredibly popular and far more flexible thanks to their greater diversity of styles and price-points. Yet their last quarter painted a very different picture.

Apple Watch, meanwhile, just had its best quarter ever. Which, when you combine Apple Watch Series 2's improved hardware, Apple Watch Series 1's lower cost of entry, and watchOS 3's greater coherence, performance, and fitness focus, pretty much anyone could see coming. (Interest in Apple Watch purchases briefly peaked even higher than iPhone on iMore, based on Black Friday and holiday pageviews.)

It could be that there is no real "Smartwatch market", just an Apple Watch market. Much like there's no real "tablet market", just an iPad market. Since it's such a new product category and most of the existing products are still bound to phones, it could also simply be too soon to tell.

Either way, it's crystal clear that Apple Watch is leading the way, not just in the smartwatch category, but as Apple's bridge to wearable technology in general.

From the same conference call:

When you look at what these products do with wireless, voice interface, communication, authentication, and more, and how each one increases the overall value of the Apple experience, it makes the bizarre narrative surrounding Apple Watch seem downright... disconnected.

Today, Apple Watch is a breakthrough accessory for iPhone. Tomorrow, the sky body's the limit.

It's Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD) and Apple is using the occaision to highlight just how fundemental and important the technology is — for everyone.

That includes the new videos embedded below, as well as new interviews with Apple CEO, Tim Cook.

Apple's commitment to accessibility, though, is nothing new. At the yearly keynotes where Apple introduces new versions of iOS, the company has repeatedly made sure to feature accessibility on stage and in video. Apple has been honored with the Hellen Keller Achievement Award for VoiceOver. The company also honored developers with Apple Design Awards for how they implement ccessibility.

App Store has regularly run features for Autism Awareness Month, for VoiceOver, and for the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Apple's constant and consistent advocacy and implementation of accessibility is also front and center on apple.com, complete with support section, a public resource page, full documentation for developers, and even a terrific tips and tricks page dedicated to it as well.

More than just features

The camera is an example of the approach Apple takes to accessibility. Instead of simply scratching it off the list as something those with low or no vision won't use, Apple tries to make it the camera something they can use.

To help take pictures, the built-in Camera app uses facial recognition to announce how many people it detects in a shot and even where they're positioned on screen. The Photos app will announce the date a photo was taken, whether it's portrait or landscape, and even whether it's crisp or blurry, low or well lit.

That's in addition to Siri voice control, the system-wide VoiceOver technology, built-in Braille support, selection and screen reading, support for descriptive audio, and the plethora of vision enhancement features like inverted colors, black and white, labels, outlines, and more.

The latest iPhones even have a mode where, instead of giving you more pixels, they magnify the size of the pixels, effectively showing you an iPhone SE interface scaled up on an iPhone 7 and an iPhone 7 interface scaled up on an iPhone 7 Plus. That can make the entire device easier to read and navigate.

For those with low or no hearing, there are options to use the LED Flash for visual alerts, custom vibrations for tactile alerts, close captioning for media, and built-in FaceTime for communicating with sign language. (Because FaceTime has end-to-end encryption, it's even used in therapy for new recipients of cochlear implants.)

Motor skills are supported with switch controls that can use the camera or an assistive device for input, as well as custom gestures. There's also AssistiveTouch, which provides virtual, on-screen controls for when hardware buttons aren't accessible enough, and a wide range of customization options for multitouch and Home button input.

All of these features not only help those with special needs but children picking up computing for the first time, and seniors whose sight, dexterity, memory, hearing, or other skills are no longer what they used to be.

There are a host of other features as well, and more coming with iOS 9 this fall. There's Guided Access for those on the autistic spectrum, and even full, system-wide support for right-to-left languages, because Accessibility is also about making sure everyone is included.

Prioritizing accessibility

Over the years, a majority of people with accessibility needs have turned towards Apple products in general and iOS-based products in particular. That's an incredible responsibility and one that Apple has to work to maintain and improve every day of every year.

In previous years, Apple has showcased the blind enjoying the wilderness for the first time thanks to the iPhone, and back in June they showed kids experiencing music for the first time as a tactile sensation. The company has highlighted messages being spoken, sign language being seen, and communication being enabled for the first time.

When Apple Watch was announced, it had accessibility features ready to go at launch. Same with Apple TV. Same with Touch Bar on MacBook Pro.

It isn't just that Apple considers accessibility. It's that the company considers it to be table stakes for its product. Not just in abstract terms in some distant and conceptually convenient future — but from day one.

No other company has provided as constant and consistent support for accessibility Apple, including driving awareness in the most prominent and public ways possible.

It's not magic. It's the result of building it into the corporate culture. It's being willing to invest by having teams whose only job is to ensure the accessibility of the system software and frameworks, and people in the company and community who care enough to propose, approve, and promote accessibility even when it's not, strictly speaking, their job.

Accessibility should be a point of pride and something that's highly competitive between companies. Every platform should feature it on stage every year, feature the best apps on every store, participate in national and global campaigns, and do everything possible to make the devices we use every day easier for everyone to use.

Accessibility for everyone

It's easy to think accessibility only matters for a few people. But the truth is anyone can be injured and need to rely on accessibility features for a period of time. Anyone can trip or fall, hurt an eye or damage hearing. And everyone gets older and needs easier ways to see and interact with our devices.

Moreover, making software, hardware, and services more accessible by definition makes them more usable for everyone. Text that is easy to read, buttons that are easy to push, notifications that are easy to feel and hear are easy for *everyone**.

There's still a lot of work to do. Everyone, including Apple, especially members of the activity community, will tell you that. Buttons could have more affordance. App Store and iTunes Store could be more accommodating. And the lists go on and on.

But I'm confident Apple will prioritize getting there. And that's due to a top-down commitment from executives and an engineering department staffed by people with the very accessibility needs the company is designing to address.

One of my favorite Tim Cook quotes comes from an investor meeting in early 2014:

I'd love every company to not just feel this way but to show us in the messaging and their products that they feel this way.

Every keynote, every OS release, every new product launch. Ultimately all of this is about making our lives better and very few things make life as far-reachingly better as accessibility.

"How do you want to pay for that?" "VISA." Tap. Beep. "Wow, that's amazing. Is that your watch?" Smile. "Boarding pass?" "On my watch!" Scan. "Wow, that's incredible! Apple Watch?" Nod. "Here's your coffee!" Scan.""Wow! I've gotta get one of those!. "Want me to pay for gas?" "Nah, I got it." Tap. "What is that, magic?"

Long before Watch was even announced, I began to wonder about what I'd want from Apple on my wrist. Convenience was my killer feature. If Watch could save me from having to reach for my phone in order to do a few important, frequent, yet simple things, it'd be the equivalent of my phone letting me leave the house without my computer.

But convenience is a hard feature to demo in the wild.

When iPhone first came out, it was cool but it wasn't some abstract coolness that made people's eyes light up. It was the specific coolness of pinch-to-zoom in Photos or Maps, or Cover Flow in iPod. Those were immediately, undeniably cool.

When Apple Watch first came out, I had trouble finding a similar demo. It didn't help that Watch wasn't a minimally delightful product in the same way as iPhone. Apple introduced it with a bevy of features which made isolating one as the go-to demo harder: Mickey may have made people smile but it didn't make them want to immediately rush out and buy.

With Watch Series 2 and watchOS 3, Apple found their focus in fitness. The product still does a lot more, of course, but the messaging and advertising has been all about those rings and workouts.

For all the greater clarity and coherence, though, the Activity Rings and Workouts still don't make a great demo. Don't get me wrong — I love closing all my Activity Rings every day and the motivation that the new sharing features provide, but if you just show those rings to people they don't get it at a glance, not like they did with pinch-to-zoom.

Then, over the last few weeks, something started happening. I went to to Apple Pay for lunch at a local restaurant and instead of the man saying "Wow!", the man behind the counter held up his own Apple Watch. Instead of the woman at Air Canada gate being shocked when I scanned my boarding pass, she held up her Watch to show me she'd just gotten one too. Instead of the guy at the Starbucks drive through thinking my Apple Watch was cool, as he reached out to scan my digital card, I saw he was wearing one of his own.

By some estimates, Apple sold 5.6 million Watches over the holidays — a quarter where Watch was and remains bafflingly constrained. That could bring the total number of Watches sold so far to a 25 million. I'm sure the new fitness focus and campaigns had something to do with that and I'm sure when people use those feature they love them.

But Apple Pay and Wallet? That's the "Wow!" moment. That's the demo I'd been looking for and the one that's been right in front of me this whole time. It's what my friends, who recently go Apple Watch, are messaging me all excited about. It's what the guy at the coffee shop counter loved when I stepped up, tapped, paid, and was on my way while the person beside me was still counting out cash. It's the magic.

Fitness is cool. Fitness is fantastic. Fitness absolutely makes our lives better. I love the first and latest ads Apple's done for Watch around fitness. But I can't help but wish for a really great Apple Watch ad centered around Apple Pay and Wallet next.

Paying at retail or at a drive-through or while jogging past a corner store. Getting your movie tickets, boarding your plane, or picking up your loyalty points. I'd even fold in opening the door to your hotel room and unlocking your Mac. An ad like that, done with the usual Apple panache, would make the convenience of Watch manifest.

Apple has succeeded in making paying for things not just cool but fun as well. Paying for things. Fun. That's something to show off.

My guess is we haven't seen a lot of this yet because the U.S. has only just begun to adopt tap-to-pay technology. That'll change, though. And as it does, I think we'll see a lot more of those "wow" moments, and Apple will sell a lot more Watches.

Tim Cook, from Apple's Q1 2017 conference call, on Apple Watch:

On iPad Pro:

Rounding up Apple's current product lineup and their relative customer satisfaction ratings:

It makes for an interesting contrast to how these products are often portrayed in the tech community.

Based on the intensity and proportion of iPhone 7 coverage devoted to its lack of a headphone jack, lack of new design, etc., a casual observer might reasonably expect the product to have been DOA. Instead it not only had a record quarter but record levels of customer satisfaction.

For a while you couldn't turn around without tripping over a hot take on wearables in general and Apple Watch in particular were a failed category and failed product. Yet, Apple Watch also had a record quarter and is also getting record levels of customer satisfaction.

How does this keep happening? I have a theory: I think it comes down to us forgetting that we're not mainstream consumers and not every product has to fit our non-mainstream consumer needs. In other words, we spend too much time reviewing for us and not enough time reviewing for everyone else.

Not only do we have different needs, we have different wants, and we forget to keep that in perspective. We have such a constant stream of new products racing past us every day that we become velocitized. It makes the sensible seem boring, the impractical seem novel, and it's drained almost every bit of meaning from how we use terms like "innovation". And it looks like we lack anything approaching self awareness about it.

That's not the really worrisome part, though. The really worrisome part is that, based on Apple's sales and satisfaction numbers, consumers are perfectly aware of all this — and they've learned to ignore us.

Sure, they'll click on our bait, but they won't respect us in the morning.

The opportunity here is to up our game. To dig deeper and go broader. To not focus so tightly on the headphone jack we lose sight of the camera, and on the wearables market we pay no attention to the Watch.

In other words, to tell the story of a product in a way that's more meaningful and respectful to the people considering whether or not to buy it.

Mark Gurman and Ian King, writing for Bloomberg:

And:

Now — and I'm just spit-balling here — imagine this is something beyond the whole Intel/ARM question. (Apple has been prototyping ARM-based Macs for years, after all).

Imagine it's an extension of the "fusion" architecture that Apple's been increasingly using across their products and services. Fusion Drive melds high-capacity platters with high-speed solid state. iCloud Libraries do something similar but meld online and local storage. The iPhone 7 Plus camera melds a wide-angle with a telephoto lens.

A better example is the A10 system-on-a-chip, though, which Apple went so far as to brand "Fusion". When Apple made the main A10 cores, they noticed it was so high-performance it actually made lower-performance tasks less efficient. So, to fill the space left beneath it, Apple added a second set of lower-performance, more power efficient cores. The result was Apple's first big.LITTLE chipset.

For several generations now, though, Apple has also been doing sensor fusion hubs by including the M-series co-processors — originally alongside but now integrated into — the A-series. That lets them do things like track motion more power efficiently.

The T1 system-in-package on the MacBook Pro is another example. The Mac controls the majority of the Touch Bar but the T1 SIP handles Touch ID, Apple Pay, and displaying any and all related data.

Power efficiency is Apple's jam. Unless and until they license x86 or swap MacBook to ARM, there's only so much even the tight and belabored integration they do with Intel will deliver them.

Offloading low-power, low-level tasks to their own silicon, though, is absolutely something Apple could and would do regardless of the main processor architecture. Same as they could and did offload display to their own, custom timing controller when they wanted to bring 5K to the iMac and the industry just hadn't gotten there yet.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple take on more and more of the silicon inside all of their devices as time goes on. Modems, graphics processors, central processors — with the team they have in place, there's no limit to what they can do other than what makes sense to them and what they choose to focus on at any given point in time.

Like I said when Apple's first wireless chip, W1 was introduced...

Introduced seven years ago this month, Apple's late co-founder, Steve Jobs, said iPad had to fight for its right to exist between phone and laptop by doing some things better than either of the other two. Since then, Apple's ability to tell that story has varied from the heights of "technology alone is not enough" to... not at all. And that's led to a lot of theories about iPad and its future.

Tim Cook, speaking during Apple's Q1 2017 conference call:

In other words, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro launched at the end of 2015 but no new iPad launched at the end of 2016, much less a high-margin one. Combine that with less inventory and shortages due to a supplier, and there was both less drive and less availability.

That takes the edge off the quarter but not off iPad in general, which by any measure isn't accelerating as fast as it did in the beginning. It was that initial acceleration — faster even than iPhone in its first years — that created incredible expectations around iPad. And it's those expectations which have now translated into incredible expectational debt.

The problem with acceleration is that it has no impact on speed limit. If you go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds or in 6 seconds, and the speed limit is 60, you simply hit the limit sooner. iPad hit its current limit wicked fast.

In many ways, you could go so far as to say there's no tablet market, just an iPad market. In other words, people don't by tablets, they by cheap video/game players (which Apple wants no part of) or they buy iPads.

That's what Steve Jobs meant when he called iPad the future of computing. His dream, and the consistent goal of Apple over the years, from Apple II to Mac to iMac to iPad, was mainstreaming computer technology. It's also why Jobs spoke of trucks and cars. iPad wasn't a PC, it was something that the majority of people would eventually find more practical than a full-on PC.

iPad, at its core, made apps and the web accessible and approachable to people, young and old, who either couldn't, hadn't, or simply never enjoyed using a PC.

It's why other vendors who tried to use "full desktop OS", multi-window multitasking, Flash, and other traditional computer paradigms to compete with iPad failed so spectacularly always. It's also why Windows on a tablet wasn't considered a selling point but a detriment. The mainstream didn't want it. They wanted iPad.

That's why so many people not only bought an iPad 2, or one of the iPads since then, but have held onto it. It's not just as much computer as they needed, its as much computer as they wanted, and they'll use it until it breaks down and stops being usable.

That's very different from the iPhone market where people upgrade every couple of years, give or take. It's closer to the Mac but, thanks to it being even more of an appliance, likely has an even longer lifespan. (And the initial acceleration that comes with a new product category being launched stuffed that cycle early.)

So, while the popular narrative is that iPad is failing, a counterargument could be made that iPad succeeded too well, too fast. It's the old PC "good enough" problem writ large.

We've also now had three generations of iPhone Plus putting pressure on iPad mini from below and two generations of MacBook putting pressure on iPad Air/Pro from above. The fight for the in-between has only gotten tougher.

Still, even this quarter's numbers, hamstrung as Tim Cook explained them to be, need to be considered carefully: iPad sold 13.1 million units, Mac sold 5.3 million.

The Mac tends to hold steady even as the PC market continues to decline, and iPad accounted for more than double the sales of the Mac.

That makes it hard to imagine the solution to the iPad problem is really making it more Mac-like — i.e., more like a traditional computer. That's different than simply making it more powerful by continuing what iPad Pro and iOS 9 started and adding more features like drag-and-drop and easier filesystem access. Personally, I'd love the former (I've argued for an iPadOS for years), though not so much the latter. Opinions vary on that, of course.

Either way, though, that only solves for "us" — for the tech niche. It adds a relatively small adjacent market to the overall iPad market but does little to for the mass mainstream market. Likewise, making bigger again iPads. That'd be great for creative professionals who want a digital drafting or drawing table, and I'd love it lots, but it also only solves for a small niche.

In order to incentivize mainstream iPad sales, Apple will need to create compelling features for the mainstream that spur upgrades in spite of current hardware being good enough. And that's a real challenge.

Most people don't upgrade PCs unless they have to either. Gamers are a notable exception but the types of games that are most popular on iPad aren't typically the ones with the highest hardware requirements.

Many people do upgrade phones even when they don't have to. That typically comes from features that are compelling on phones, especially better cameras, and from carrier or retailer incentives. It's unclear iPad benefits in the same way from things like camera enhancements, which the 9.7-inch iPad Pro got last spring, and the new features that are compelling, like Apple Pencil and Smart Connector again play more to the niche than the mainstream.

Apple offers an iPhone Upgrade Program to, which is similar to a lease and offers a new phone yearly, but whether or not an iPad Upgrade Program would work is an open question. (And Apple would have to stick to a yearly upgrade cycle, which may not always match their roadmap.)

Tim Cook again:

Cook knows the future of iPad better than anyone on the planet and he typically says exactly what he feels and thinks. (I sometimes wonder if that makes things confusion to people not used to CEOs being so candid.)

There are new iPads coming — Apple isn't getting out of that business — and they'll be better than any iPad that's come before.

Short term, people who bought iPad 2 or iPad 3, the original iPad mini or Air will start to time out and the upgrade cycles will start to kick in.

Longer term, Apple will have to decide if they want to keep iPad aimed squarely at the mainstream, if they want to continue to explore the pro niche, or if they can do both — If they can avoid making it a truck but somehow nail iPad as SUV.

For that, we'll have to wait and see.

The FTC is investigating Qualcomm, and Apple is suing them. Tim Cuplan, writing for Bloomberg, follows the money:

I heard similar a few years ago. Basically that you (Apple) pay, and pay a lot, regardless of whether or not you need the technology. For example, CDMA outside Verizon or Sprint. If you ever wondered why there was a $130 surcharge for iPads with cellular radios, that's the primary reason. Think about what that would translate into for a $3,000 MacBook Pro... and maybe why we don't have that MacBook Pro.

Either way, there are issues of standards-based FRAND technology patents, reasonableness, abusive practices, and the future of wireless to contend with here. Qualcomm — and CDMA — have arguably been holding us back for years.

Depending on how the FTC investigation and lawsuits turn out, that could finally be over.

I'm typically less interested in rumors about what Apple may or may not be doing than problems that need to be solved and how Apple could address them. OLED and Touch ID on iPhone 8 is one of those problems.

Financial Analyst and supply-chain spelunker, Ming Chi-Kuo, as quoted by MacRumors:

Here's the thing: 3D Touch, as currently implemented on iPhone, is dependent on the LCD screen's LED backlight. The LED is what measures the deformation of the glass under pressure and provides that data to iOS. Take away the LCD by switching to OLED technology, and you take away the LED. Take away the LED, and you take away the current implementation of 3D Touch.

So, if Apple is indeed switching to OLED for iPhone 8 they, by necessity, also have to change how 3D Touch works on iPhone 8. That's not a huge deal — Force Touch on Apple Watch uses a different implementation of pressure sensitivity, and Force Touch on the Mac Trackpad another implementation different than both. There are numerous ways to make pressure sensitivity work, Apple will simply use the one that best fits the requirements of the device.

Same with OLED. There are numerous screen technologies, including LCD, OLED, and Quantum Dot. They're also just implementation details. Apple, again, will use the one that best fits the device. Earlier on, that was LCD for quality. (PenTile sub-pixels were not a good thing.) Then it was LCD for 3D Touch. If Apple wants to do something LCD can't do, like gett thinner, more energy efficient, and curve the display, the OLED begins to win out. (Especially newer, better OLED.)

It's similar to NFC and why it's not opened up on iPhone. Apple considered NFC going back to the iPhone 4/s days but back then it was a chipset Apple doesn't do chipsets, they do feature sets. In other words, Apple doesn't do NFC, they do Apple Pay. That's why NFC was never added to iPhone — Apple Pay was. NFC was just an implementation detail. Maybe one day it'll be opened up or will enable additional features, but Apple Pay got it in there.

Apple patents everything, so it's tough to read too much into them. That said, biometrics aren't security — they're convenience. They aren't passwords — they're user IDs.

Also, two-steps don't enhance security, they enhance complexity. Two factors enhance security. Biometrics are both "something you are". For a second factor, you'd need to require the password as well for "something you know".

One of my biggest requests for iOS remains the ability to choose to require both a password and biometrics, be that Touch ID or any technology Apple may add in the future. That would enable true two-factor for device access.

You could also throw in a third factor — trusted device proximity with Apple Watch — for those who want full-on three factor. Then you'd have "something you are", "something you know", and "something you have". Best of all, with the way Touch ID and Auto Unlock are already implemented, they're virtually transparent.

Two-factor, even three-factor, would essentially be as easy as one — password.

From the moment I first held an iPhone 7 at the September Apple event, I knew the Taptic Engine was something special.

Those core effects are still delightful and developers have begun integrating advanced Taptics into their apps as well. I remain incredibly bullish about the technology's future, especially now that word is filtering out about the Nintendo Switch:

Based on Nintendo's event alone, the ice cube segment seemed... odd. It wasn't given any specific context. Reading the above, though, and the context is clear. Nintendo is taking haptics — simulated sensation — to yet new heights. (I can't wait for the teardown to see how they're doing it.)

It might seem like games or tricks right now, but if you take what Apple is doing and take what Nintendo is doing, and you push it out over time, the potential is remarkable.

The idea of picking up my iPhone 8 or iPhone 9 or whatever and feeling every key I press, every knob I slide, every cell I swipe, is easy enough. It's everything else that I'm looking forward to. Ice cubes in cups or marbles in a container are fun, but the interactivity, and maybe even accessibility, behind them are compelling.

For a long time interfaces were mainly pixels on screens, Braille terminals and a few other alternatives aside. Now voice interfaces are becoming more common. Tactile interfaces, thanks to technology like Apple's Taptic Engine and Nintendo's Joy-Con, will be as well.

(Especially in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), which both companies may be interested in but neither currently ships.)

And as multi-sensory humans, the more affordances we have, the better.

The biggest story of last year was the FBI trying to force Apple to compromise iOS security by creating a "back door" into iPhone and iPad. Less than technically savvy people insisted that, if they and only they had the "key" there'd be no risk of hackers, criminals, or other, less-than-friendly governments getting it. Apple CEO, Tim Cook, and just about everyone else knew there'd be no stopping it.

Maya Kosoph, writing for Vanity Fair:

Joseph Cox, writing for Motherboard, has the details:

It's not a question of whether or not a government "backdoor" would be similarly compromised. It's simply a question of how fast.

2016 is where we saw the right to digital privacy begin to play out on the legal stage. That's only going to continue in 2017. Nothing has been settled and no political party in any major region, regardless of its social or fiscal policy, has shown anything other than a desire to collect even more of our data, legally and otherwise.

Britain has just passed its Snooper Charter and the U.S. has just increased surveillance powers.

It's very likely the only people we'll be able to count on to protect our privacy going forward is us.

Update, January 12, 2017: Consumer Reports now recommends the MacBook Pro.

No specific author is credited with the update, which seems strange. Consumer Reports also seemingly still doesn't recognize the problem with the original article, which led to as many questions about their testing and publishing methodology as it did MacBook Pro battery life.

Also: Can I get a MacBook Pro that runs 18.75 hours? Pretty please?

Update, January 10, 2017: Apple provided me with the following statement on Consumer Reports' test:

Update, December 23, 2016: Apple's head of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, posted the following statement on Twitter:

Here's hoping Consumer Reports shares their test method with Apple so the results can be vetted and, if necessary fixes can be made. That's what's best for the consumer.

There's been a lot of discussion around MacBook Pro battery life. For some people it's been fine. For others, problematic. Some reviewers have had a great time. Others have had a bad experience. Apple is sticking to their original estimates, but given the ongoing debate, it's something that needs a deeper look. Sadly, Consumer Reports hasn't done that. If anything, they've only increased confusion.

What was the test?

Was it because some tests used Chrome instead of Safari, which previous tests have shown can greatly reduce battery life?

If I were running the tests, that right there would be a red flag. A huge, glowing, neon red flag.

Those results make very little sense and I'd take apart my chain, link by link, until I found out what was going on. I'd check and re-check my tests, I'd watch the systems like a hawk, and I'd do everything possible to find what was causing the variance. I'd even — gasp — try testing different machines and something other than web pages to see if that revealed more information.

Inconsistent results from battery life tests, for responsible publications, aren't a reason to rush out a headline in time for the holidays. They're a reason to start questioning everything, and to diligently retrace every step along the way, until you can get repeatable, reputable results.

What did Consumer Reports do?

As someone who's been using a new MacBook Pro since the event back in October, and seldom with an outlet nearby, I'd laugh at that if I wasn't so busy crying. Then again, I know how to use Activity Monitor... My anecdote isn't data, though, and neither is Consumer Reports'.

Sadly, we now live in a world filled with manufactured controversies and, quite often, fake news. It's fake claims about real sapphire, cancelled watch apps that ship on time, and the perpetual rush not just to find the next "gate" but, in many cases, to create it.

"Bendgate" and "chipgate" showed there was blood in the pageview water, so now the click sharks are circling.

Now, I don't think Consumer Reports is faking news here, but I do think they're after attention more than they are answers. Otherwise, I think they would have taken the time to figure out what happened, why, and presented something truly useful. Sadly, I don't think that's their primary concern anymore. And it's why I stopped reading Consumer Reports years ago. (Yes, even their Samsung Galaxy waterproofing report.)

These days, if I'm interested in battery life tests, I go to AnandTech or Ars Technica, where they show their work, explain their methods, and often take whatever time is required to get real answers before hitting publish. Same for other areas. I look to the experts who don't settle for confusion but demand clarity.

If there is something wrong with the MacBook Pro battery, then I want to know about it. Just saying you got inconsistent results is as valuable as telling me it takes 1, 4, or 12 hours to cook a turkey – not at all. I can get food poisoning or burn a bird on my own, thanks.

Neil Cybart, writing for his Above Avalon newsletter:

I considered including retention in my biggest problems facing Apple in 2017 piece but ultimately decided against it for similar reasons. The only way to absolutely avoid losing brilliant, driven people is not to hire brilliant, driven people.

Apple does the opposite. They seek out and attract the kind of people who want to work on Project Purple (iPhone), Gizmo (Watch), or Titan (the rumored car project). They're the kinds of people who want to be part of the next big thing — of denting the next universe. Apple, by virtue of having brought several of those kinds of products to market and explored many more beyond, is one of the best opportunities to do just that.

But not the only place. Sometimes, the kind of person who wants to revolutionize phones will want to revolutionize something else, be it an app, an accessory, a service, or a combination of those things. If Apple has no interest in what they specifically want to do, they'll have to go somewhere else.

Apple also doesn't have a lot of room at the top. There aren't many people at the highest levels of the company and they don't turn over that often. When and if they do, and the position isn't filled by someone from the outside, it's still a single opportunity. Two or more people can't occupy the same space at the same time so, inevitably, some change spaces. And sometimes, after years at Apple, some people just want some time out, even if its just for the chance to build something of their own with all the tools they'd previously been making for others.

Once upon a time a bunch of people who worked on the original iPhone left to go work on the Palm Pre. That it didn't work out, so some moved on again and others came back to Apple. That pattern has repeated itself several times over the intervening years. Facebook was actively going after Apple talent for a while, giving people a lot of money but ultimately not much to do. Many have gone to startups over the years with some also coming back again. Now, Tesla.

People leave Apple. People also come back to Apple. Some do that multiple times. Others simply move around inside the company, looking for the projects that interest and excite them the most. Some have moved from iOS to watchOS or tvOS and some have moved back again or on to new projects. None of this should be the least bit surprising in a company Apple's size and with people this talented.

Brilliant, driven people are exactly the kinds of people Apple wants but are also exactly the kinds of people who can be hard to retain. That's why some who ran teams at Apple either leave or get poached to run entire organizations elsewhere.

There's already a senior vice president of software engineering at Apple and several absolutely top-flight vice presidents with wide-ranging skills beyond the bits, including interface and design, marketing and education, partnering and more. Project Titan's already got a software lead as well in Dan Dodge, former head of QNX — a real-time operating system at the heart of many existing infotainment systems and much, much more. In that environment, the biggest opportunities for movement, if movement is what's really desired, may well exist elsewhere.

That's not to say Apple can't pay more attention to their internal dynamics and do a better job keeping key people at the company whenever possible. They can and should always be doing more and better. It'll just never always be possible.

Sal Soghoian, former Automation lead at Apple, writing for MacStories:

This, based on my understanding, is exactly what's been happening in the software engineering division recently. The thinking behind it, though, is nothing new. For a long time Apple's had a CoreOS group, among others, that worked on the underlying technologies central to both iOS and macOS. They're built on the same foundation, after all, so continuing to build out that foundation in as unified a way as possible simply makes sense.

Likewise, new technologies have been designed for both from the start. Swift, the programming language Apple debuted a few years ago, is one example. It's how developers will code for macOS and iOS in the future. Apple File System (APFS), announced last year, is the same. It'll eventually run everything from Watch to Mac.

Now, the same is true at the built-in app level. Getting the original iPhone and iPad to ship required enormous efforts, dedicated teams, and a ton of resource reallocation. Over the years, that resulted in some disparities. A few years ago Apple brought all if it back together under Craig Federighi, and now that same strategy is being applied to apps. Safari will be Safari at the code level. Mail will be Mail, Messages will be Messages, Calendar to be Calendar... you get the idea.

Having different code bases behind apps with the same name was never meant to be what differentiated iPhone and iPad from Mac. Having interfaces that best served the interaction models of each platform was. That's what end-users experience — the interface and interaction model. Everything else is pipes and plumbing hidden away beneath. The more of that stuff that's the same, the better. It improves compatibility and efficiency.

The iPhone and iPad remain multitouch devices optimized for direct manipulation, a hyper-accessible and mobile reimagining of the computer for the modern, mainstream world. Mac remains a mouse and pointer system — okay, now with Touch Bar! — and a traditional computer for those tasks that still require one.

Ideally, iOS will continue to benefit from the deep foundations of macOS, and macOS will continue to benefit from the innovations of iOS. Unfortunately, we don't always get ideals. Sometimes, short term, we'll get subsets that'll work on both. Long term, we'll get whatever, philosophically, Apple chooses to add back in and evolve further.

I'll spare you another regurgitation of iWork here.

I continue to believe that extensibility, introduced in iOS 8, is one of the most important developments in the history of the platform. It enables interoperability while maintaining privacy and security. Through Share Sheet and other manifestations, extensibility greatly accelerates the perceptive speed of the system and makes everything far more convenient. But extensibility is not automation.

Workflow is an iOS app that shows just how powerful "real" automation can be on iOS. It can also be accessed via extensibility. But that doesn't make extensibility itself a automator.

As much as I'd hate to see Workflow "Sherlocked" — copied at the system-level — by Apple, I'd love a base form of built-in automation on iOS. On the surface it's an incredibly niche feature but iOS has a way of making the niche more accessible to the mainstream.

I sometimes think Apple is worried about making iOS too complex — making it too much like macOS — and so they take a long time figuring out features like copy and paste or drag and drop. I understand the concern but, in my mind, iPad and iPhone should be allowed to evolve as though the Mac didn't exist. (And vice-versa.) The only goal should be to be the best. Like Phil Schiller has said (paraphrase) — iPad should be so good it puts pressure on the Mac and Mac should be so good it puts pressure back on iPad.

Having one team responsible for Safari, Mail, Messages, etc. on both platforms is great and hopefully means that, going forward, "Sent with Fireworks" is something I'll never have to see on my Mac again. But it's also something I hope, eventually, elevates the built-in apps on both platforms in a way disparate teams never could.

Check out the rest of Sal's article and let me know what you think.

Update: I clarified some of the language above so my rapid change of topic wouldn't cause so much whiplash.

Chuq von Raspach, writing for his chuqui blog:

I don't generally like to pull that much of a quote, but Chuq's piece is long and thoughtful enough that there's still plenty left to read. And you should.

Last week I posted my annual problems facing Apple piece. Some were similar, some different. I included shipping, the horn effect, the need for better service experience, and positioning for what's next. I explained the "what" but I neglected to explain the "why".

Chuq, who used to work at Apple, Palm, and other Silicon Valley staples, went straight for the "why".

Fixing it, of course, is non-trivial. Should Apple go back to doing less but doing it better? That's not realistic at this point. Should Apple figure out how to scale the same focus and attention from one business to three, to nine, to many? That'd be terrific, but how do they do that and remain Apple?

Maybe the company should simply set better expectations for themselves and for their customers? Right now, all too often, we have Schrödinger's products — not dead yet certainly not alive — and that hurts everyone.

It feels like I spend most of my time these days knocking down manufactured controversies or "fake tech news". I do it because we get pelted with so much noise week after week it becomes almost impossible to separate the real problems from the sensationalized ones. And Apple, like any big company, has real problems.

Some of them are similar to those from year's past. Others are new or, in my mind, newly important. None of them are spell immediate doom for a company with billions in the bank, of course, but any or all of them could become critical to Apple's sustained relevance over the next decade.

Retention remains one of them. So is the scalability of the organization. The diversity of the board and the company. The stability of the various platforms. And so on. I'm going to pick four to focus on for now, though: The four I think deserve particular attention to in 2017.

Shipping

"Great artists ship" was a favorite saying of Apple's late co-founder, Steve Jobs. Logistics and supply chain management are skills Apple's former COO, now CEO, Tim Cook, and current COO, Jeff Williams have taken to near-legendary levels.

Yet for the last little while, Apple has been plagued by supply problems. We've had products come in hot, like iPad mini and Apple TV. We've had products come in incredibly constrained like Apple Pencil, iPhone SE, iPhone 7 Plus, or Apple Watch Series 2. And we've had products come in late, like AirPods.

Sometimes it's the result of inaccurate demand forecasting, of higher component constraints or lower yields than expected. Sometimes it's because of last minute issues or of changes to materials or manufacturing processes. Sometimes it's just about resources and priorities.

Whatever the cause, it means Apple can't sell as many of the products as they otherwise would, which is bad for Apple. Worse, people can't buy them in a timely fashion, which makes for a terrible customer experience.

Satisfaction levels are still tremendously high, so once people get the products, they like them. It's just the getting part that needs work.

Apple has always been a company with an incredibly focused product lineup. Once upon a time, that was just the Mac. Now it's iPhone and iPad, Watch and TV, accessories and AirPods.

iPhone still ships on time — it has to — but it would behoove customers if Apple figured out how to forecast and fulfill all the other products in a timely manner as well.

The horn effect

Apple makes more money from iPhone in a month than they make from Mac all year. Apple also sells far, far, ludicrously far more notebook Macs than desktop Macs. As customers, we're literally voting with our wallets that all we want from Apple is more and more mobile.

That doesn't mean desktop Macs aren't important, though. They're not just the trucks in Apple's fleet, they're the trucking industry.

Yet Mac Pro hasn't been updated since 2013, Mac mini since 2014, and iMac since 2015. It's tempting to simply file that under problematic as well but, since Apple's last major updates also made all of those computers into computing appliances, unable to be updated by the average customer, a better word is "unacceptable". When you take away someone's ability to do something for themselves, you take on the absolute responsibility of doing it for them.

Likewise, Apple is still making Magic keyboards, mouses, and trackpads, at least for now, but they've gotten out of the display business and, rumor has it, they're getting out of the router business next.

So, we're approaching a world where, if you want to get a high-end computer, display, or router, you have to get it from a company other than Apple. That's been the case with gaming and printers for a while now, but once you start adding video production and routers, and other industries and peripherals, there's an increasing chance it snowballs.

Once you start getting things from a company other than Apple, it's easier to get the next thing from that other company, and the next thing. Eventually that could include notebooks and, yes, even phones.

The halo effect helped build out from iPod and iPhone to full-on ecosystem that provides far more value than the sum of its parts. The horn effect could do the opposite. It could begin to break apart a lot of hard-won gains Apple's made over the last decade.

Services experience

Much of 2016 was wasted worrying about Apple being behind in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. But Apple's been doing both, quietly, for years. In some ways, thanks to owning their own silicon, Apple might even be ahead. Where Apple has been falling down, though, is in services experience.

For traditional products, Apple is famous for sweating every detail from the packaging to the pixel. Design paints the back of the fence. Software engineering is managed three levels down. Services, though, has had to transform from content contract negotiation and file delivery to a range of businesses vaster and more complex than perhaps any other organization.

And it needs to adopt some of the culture of the traditional software and hardware divisions to cope with it. Including, I'd argue, a high-profile, public-facing VP of services experience whose only job it is, day in, day out, is to make sure everything from Siri to Maps to Music is delightful.

None of the complaints made by major news outlets about silly Siri omissions this year should have been discovered by journalists. No Apple Music edge-cases should have curled Dalrymple's beard. All of it should have been found and fixed first by a team lead by a services VP whose only job is to make sure exactly that stuff is found and fixed first.

In 2016, Apple finally gave us a dedicated VP of App Store, something I've been wishing for for years. In 2017, I'm hoping we get a VP of services experience as well. And one smart and powerful enough that it's near-instantly apparent.

What's NeXT

20 years ago Apple hit a brick wall. The technology that had birthed the Mac would take them no further. And so they bought NeXT, got Steve Jobs back, and charted a course for the next two decades. That gave them macOS (née OS X) and, eventually, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

Another brick wall approaches, though. (It always does.) iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV are all riding high right now, but there'll come a point where the technology behind them reaches its limit and can take them no farther. (It always will.)

What then? It's doubtful there'll be another NeXT to buy. That means Apple has to prepare its own next NeXT.

This might not be a concern. Modern Apple is great at obsoleting themselves and it's quite possible Swift, Apple File System, and some of the other things they've been working on could combine, step by step, year over year, to eventually rejuvenate everything.

But the recent ups and downs with the rumored Project Titan could also show that Apple isn't looking as far forward as they could. My biggest hope for Titan was never a car but for new processes and technologies that could lead to many new products over the next decade. Now it looks like that won't be happening, at least not there, and it's uncertain what the others opportunities there will be for that kind of incubator.

NeXT and a few other key technologies and insights perfectly positioned Apple to ride the mobile revolution into unprecedented success. Another revolution will come, not just in AI or AR but in the core technologies that power them. And Apple will need the next NeXT, and the the next big insight, to ride that next wave.

Your biggest challenges?

Those are five of the biggest challenges I see facing Apple in 2017 and beyond. What are yours and how would you like to see Apple tackle them?

Vector is a news and analysis show focusing on the biggest stories, hottest trends, and most important issues in technology and popular culture. On this week's show, it's a Vector New Year's spectacular — Guy English has gone missing, Rene Ritchie's off at a fundraiser, and so Georgia Dow and Dave Wiskus call in Joe Cieplinski to help them discuss all the controversial social technology stories of 2014.

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Panel

• Georgia Dow of Isometric
• Dave Wiskus of Better Elevation
• Joe Cieplinski of joecieplinski.com

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Vector is a news and analysis show focusing on the biggest stories, hottest trends, and most important issues in technology and popular culture. On this week's show — live from Çingleton in Montreal — special guest Vicki Murley talks Satya Nadella and the pay gap, Georgia talks online bullying, Rene talks iOS 8 adoption rates, and Dave talks conference conversation.

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Show notes

• Çingleton
• Microsoft CEO Suggests Women Not Ask for Raises, Trust in 'Karma'
• @satyanadella on Twitter
• Satya Nadella email to employees: RE: Grace Hopper Conference
• 47% of devices are using iOS 8.
• iOS 8 Adoption Stagnates Just Two and a Half Weeks After Launch
• Note to Self: It's the Storage Space, Stupid

Panel

• Georgia Dow of Isometric
• Guy English of Kickingbear
• Vicki Murley of Sprightly Books
• Dave Wiskus of Better Elevation
• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

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Vector is a news and analysis show focusing on the biggest stories, hottest trends, and most important issues in technology and popular culture. On this week's show, we talk about how we chose our new iPhones — except for Guy who just downloaded iOS 8 — and what we think of them, iPhone scalpers and questions of racism, U2's supposed plans to bring back albums and fight piracy, Apple's new security and privacy policies and possible government backlash, and which of us secretly wants a gold Retina MacBook Air...

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Thing 1

• iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus (and iOS 8)
• Scalping in New York
• Gruber on the scalping video
• The lost art of software testing

Thing 2

• Marco's thoughts on music

Thing 3

• Tim Cook's thought on privacy

Thing 4

• Gold Retina MacBook Air rumor

Panel

• Georgia Dow of Isometric
• Guy English of Kickingbear
• Dave Wiskus of Better Elevation
• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

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Vector is a news and analysis show focusing on the biggest stories, hottest trends, and most important issues in technology, past, present, and future. On this week's show, Anand Shimpi of AnandTech joins Rene to talk about 64-bit processors, mobile GPUs, ART, Extension Pack, Swift, Metal, camera and battery technology, and more!

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• A Closer Look at Android RunTime (ART) in Android L
• Some Thoughts on Apple's Metal API
• Apple A7 SoC Explained

Guests

• Anand Shimpi of AnandTech

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• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

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Vector is a news and analysis show focusing on the biggest stories, hottest trends, and most important issues in technology, past, present, and future. On this week's show, Ben Bajarin of Techpinions joins Rene to talk about the Amazon Fire Phone, why it was made and who it was made for, and what it means for Google's Android and Apple's iPhone.

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Show notes

• Amazon Fire Phone
• Mobile Opportunities and Challenges In the Android Ecosystem
• Answering the 64-Bit Question
• Amazon announces perplexing Fire Phone, matters nothing for Apple and iPhone

Guests

• Ben Bajarin of Techpinions

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• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

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Live from Macworld|iWorld 2014 Rene talks to Don Melton, former director of internet technology at Apple, and Matt Drance, former Apple evangelist, about web apps, native apps, hybrid apps, CarPlay, Oculus rift, and what comes next!

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Guests

• Matt Drance of Apple Outsider
• Don Melton of donmelton.com

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• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

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Vector is Mobile Nations' cross-site, cross-platform analysis podcast where we talk about the biggest stories and issues in tech with the smartest people in the industry. On this week's episode, Don Melton and Guy English join Rene to get super geeky about 4K TV (aka UHD or 2160p), HEVC (aka H.265), VP8, and the future of televisions, physical and digital media, and transcoding.

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Show notes

• Vector 22: How to rip and transcode video for the best quality possible
• 4K resolution
• Ultra-high definition television
• High efficiency video codec (H.265)
• VP8
• Why Ultra HD 4K TVs are still stupid
• Active 3D vs. passive 3D: What's better?
• Netflix Internet Connection Speed Recommendations (Unfortunately, it doesn’t include their requirements for “Ultra HD.” That’s actually 12.6 Megabits per second.)
• 4K, HDMI, and Deep Color

Guests

• Don Melton of donmelton.com
• Guy English of Kickingbear

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• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

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Matthew Panzarino, co-editor of TechCrunch joins Rene to talk about why mobile is going wearable, how contextual information and sensors are evolving, and how Apple, Google, Samsung, and everyone else will try and sell them to us.

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Guests

• Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch

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• Rene Ritchie of Mobile Nations

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Rene Ritchie: Matthew Panzarino, co-editor of TechCrunch, how are you?

Matthew Panzarino: Just fine, sir. How are you?

Rene: Very well, thank you. First, congratulations on the new gig. I know it's not brand brand-new, but it's still new-ish.

Matthew: Yeah, it's new-ish, for sure. I'm enjoying it. I'm just getting up to speed. Everything is flowing pretty well. It's a whole different ballgame, but I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it a lot.

Rene: We were talking before the show. The only metaphor I can give for people who aren't familiar with how this industry works is that you're running as fast as you can while your jacket is caught in a steamroller that is slowly working its way towards you from behind.

Matthew: Yeah, that's pretty much it. Every once in a while, you take your jacket off, put on a new jacket, and then it starts happening all over again.

Rene: There's always another steamroller.

Matthew: Yeah, absolutely.

Rene: One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is what's been in the news very recently. It's getting a lot of attention. That's this entire idea of wearables, whether it's stuff we already have, like Pebble watches, or stuff people are talking about, like iWatches. Is this a real trend, Matt, or is this something that we're sort of looking at Dick Tracy and the future, and just really wishing it would be here?

Matthew: Yeah, I think there's some of that wish fulfillment. I think that there have been wearable devices for a long, long time. You're going to get a lot of people digging into the past of wearables now that it's become such a hot topic, and obviously if you're a student of tech wearable history, you know about calculator watches, and the various audio and video products that we've strapped on to our wrists and faces.

The Sony Glasstron was supposed to be the next big thing in home entertainment. That was a set of glasses you strapped to your face that Sony made, that had the video screens in them. There's been a variety of these things that have popped up over the years.

I think that, obviously, certain trends like miniaturization, and very power conscious microprocessors and coprocessors, and things like that, are leading towards an inflection point where we're starting to get wearable devices that are truly capable and powerful of handling multiple tasks, and multiple vectors of information gathering, versus glasses that you have to plug into an enormous battery pack, or your cigarette lighter while you're driving in the car, that you can watch video in the backseat, or something, the very cumbersome feeling.

I think that there certainly a technological inflection point that we're hitting now that will enable new experiences, but I think a lot of the stuff that has been produced so far is hung up on older paradigms that aren't forward thinking. They're not forward looking and they tend to get a little hung up on what we wished was going to happen versus what we're actually capable of now, that we have the modern technology.

People are trying to fulfill dreams that they had years ago instead of going, "That was interesting, but what's actually possible now. Now that we have a mini supercomputer in our pocket, what kind of other others can we do that aren't taken care of by that?"

That thing is our TV. We don't need a TV on our wrist really, so what can do with the wearables now that we didn't imagine before or didn't have a path towards before?

Rene: It's interesting to me and this is going to sound silly. But the in the original "Star Trek," they had the communicator which no looks outdated by modern phone technology. But "Star Trek: The Next Generation," they had that little broach on their chest that they could just tap.

They went from a handheld to a wearable and it just seems that even then they knew that the future would be even more personal technology.

But just like the shift from when you had a Mac, or Linux, or a Windows PC on your desktop and the Windows Phone, Android Phone, or iPhone is nowhere near as powerful as those things, but we were willing to use them because they gave us so many more advantages and mobility and constant connectivity.

Does there have to be a similar shift in wearables? Because obviously at least the first generation won't do as much as our phones, they're going to have to offer us something in exchange for that.

Matthew: I think your example of moving to the broach is an interesting one, the "Next Generation" stuff. Obviously, those guys are just spooling things out, "What will look good on TV?" and all of that.

But it turns out that there is a very similar thing going on where technology is moving towards proactive or passive information gathering with proactive elements. Anticipatory computing is kind of what I've been using to talk about it.

That involves devices like a wearable unit for instance with sensors on board and that mates with software to gather signals about your environment and gather information about you, and what you do, and where you are -- a.k.a. context -- and then it parses that to offer you information on the fly as you need it or more importantly, before you need it.

I think that there are some aspects of the current way that wearables work -- like the Pebble, for instance -- that work on a very much, strictly passive way, where they will pass on information from a phone, for instance, or they will tell you what the weather is if you ask it, or will do things on a timed basis. But timing, and push notifications that are just being sent from your phone, those are all fairly passive things. They're not proactive things.

I think that as we pull the thread on wearables, they're getting more powerful as far as the signals that they can gather, like location, and spatial awareness, and motion, and that sort of thing. Then you mate that with the software properly, and you're going to end up with something that provides a real additional, contextual, proactive value to the user.

I think that's the Rubicon we got to cross, and I think that's what the, hopefully, the next generation of products is going to do, is say, "This thing offers you a distinct value, a distinct life improving value, over not having it." I think a lot of the discussion has been based around, "What does this offer you over your smart phone?" I think that's the wrong question to ask, because nobody's getting rid of their smart phone.

If you sell it as an accessory to a smart phone, I think you're already doing it wrong. I think that's the wrong tactic to take, and I think if you're developing the product with that mindset, it's going to lead you down the wrong path. You're going to think about it wrong from the very beginning, you're going to develop the product wrong, you're going to solve the wrong problems.

Instead, you need to think, "What can we make that is going to significantly improve people's lives enough to where they absolutely must have it on the wrist, and they must have this device on their face, or they must have this device clipped to whatever?" That is the important question, and if I'm reading the signals correctly, I think that's one of the questions Apple's asking themselves about the iWatch is that...

Apple's not really in the business, anymore, if you could ever argue that they wanted to be, of making niche products. This is a company that makes products for massive amounts of people, and I think that any new categories that they enter, they're going to want to seriously think about, "What's the addressable market of this particular device?" The addressable market of a device that is an accessory to an iPhone is pretty big.

They've sold a lot of iPhones, or even an iPad. They've sold a lot of iPads, a lot of iPhones. But that's still...they keep too small, I believe. I think that what they want to do is produce a device where the addressable market is everybody that has an iPhone, everybody that could gain additional value out of this...whatever this device can do for them, say health monitoring, proactive warnings, or proactive suggestions about activity, and health, and that sort of thing.

Then also say, "That is a reason for people to buy into that ecosystem." That's sort of what the iPhone did, it offered people a reason to buy into Apple's ecosystem like, "This is an awesome smart phone, you can get into that, and then you can buy a Mac, and then go from there."

Rene: There are a couple of things to break down in there. One is, when you talk to someone like Eric Migicovsky from Pebble, he says that we're still in the Palm-5 days, which will give a chuckle to anyone who remembers those days of wearables.

Apple is usually a really patient company. They wait until a market is established enough, like you said, that they can start selling hundreds of millions of products, and that the existing products suck, and they think that they can make a better product that would solve the problem in a much better way than what exists at the time.

Like that famous slide Steve Jobs put up of existing Blackberries, and Trios, I think it was a Windows mobile phone, a Moto-Q, or something of the time. Then they make the case for why Apple can do this better.

Do you think we're at the point where wearables suck enough, but are big enough of a market for Apple to enter in the same way they did with phones, or do you think we're still in the stage that if they enter it, it will be a more ecosystem in enhancing play, like an Apple TV?

Matthew: They could go either way. It is a choice available to them that they could approach it as a hobby, or as an ancillary business to the iPhone, but I think that the market forces at work, and their philosophy towards expanding outwards from their initial categories, or the categories that are in play right now, are going to force them..."Force," I guess, is the wrong word. They will encourage them to think of it as a larger item, a mass market item.

There are already some examples out there of what wearables can do. I don't think any of them are particularly terrible, the ones that are successful and that are widely adopted -- the Pebble, Fitbit, and the Nike FuelBand, to a degree. A couple of the other ones are pretty decent, but there are a lot of examples of some pretty rough stuff out there too.

The allegory is not exactly comparable to the smartphone market at the time that the iPhone came on, but it does some definite comparisons. A lot of the smartphones that were out before the iPhone was released did a lot of the things that the iPhone did, and more, but they did them in a way that was...

Rene: Inaccessible?

Matthew: Yeah. It wasn't forward thinking. I had a Windows mobile phone, several of them. I had a Palm and Treos and that sort of thing. Those devices were not bad to use. I liked my Treo a lot. The difficulties came when you took the operating system or software that was running on the device and then pushed it up against any real-world challenges.

If you used their initial software install and just used their calendar, their contact list, and preloaded whatever they decided to put on it, it was probably OK and you enjoyed it.

The second you started loading apps, trying to transfer files from one device other, or basically matched it up against any cool real-life things you wanted to do, all of that stuff started falling down. They didn't have that holistic approach to getting everything to work right together and being able to hold their horses until it did, until they could deliver or at least try to deliver on something that was a clean, simple experience.

I remember transferring a 20 or 30-second video clip from one Sony Ericsson T68i to another or something like that. It was like 35 minutes via infrared, and if you moved the phone out of alignment slightly, forget it. You're done.

[crosstalk]

Rene: ...contact was 35 minutes sometimes. [laughs]

Matthew: I know, exactly. That kind of stuff was painful. What we end up with wearables is that you have certain things that are...People have learned a lot of lessons. I hesitate to say this. I'm not saying that Apple is the only person that could build good hardware, but a lot of these companies have learned some lessons from Apple in building polished, holistic products where the hardware and software work together to a goal.

I don't want to make that seem like Apple is the only company that can do that. There are others doing it. But they were definitely one of companies that set a standard there and set a stake in the ground. They set it a long, long time before it became evident that it was actually the right way to go.

The key to that switch being flipped, where all these companies started saying this is the right thing, is when all of the tolerances for crappy experiences and bad meshing of goals versus realities, all of that got heightened when smartphones became our primary computing platform, when that shift started to happen.

Of course, all the tolerances got really tiny. If something is annoying on a desktop, maybe something's out of alignment a little bit, you move the window a little bit. You've got a mouse. You've got a pointer. You just click and move. The tolerances are all very broad there.

It's like building a deck in your backyard. You hammer the boards in. If the gap is one-sixteenth larger on this end than it is on that end, no big deal. Maybe you drop a corn chip and it goes through on this end and gets stuck in a crack on this end. It doesn't matter. It's not a big deal.

But if you look at it in terms of putting a wood floor in your home, and you've got the tongue and groove. The tongue slips inside the groove. The slat flaps down. You put the next one in, and you kick it in with a rubber mallet to make sire that there's no gap at all. When you're done with the nice wooden floor, if there's a one-sixteenth gap on one end, you're going to notice. This is a whole different matter.

That's what happened with mobile devices. You end up with a situation where the tolerances for sloppiness or software and hardware not meshing quite right were so much smaller that all of sudden Apple's strategy, when it came to Macs, for instance, paid off immensely, very, very quickly, in a very obvious fashion. People started to adopt that and go for that.

What we have in wearables is, people have learned a lot of those lessons. They're trying really hard to create those kind of experiences. They've got apps that work well with the device. You don't have to use some third-party app to interact with the device. Those device makers are making their own software and making their own hardware. Which a lot of people take for granted now, but that was definitely not the case in the Palm days. To get a third-party contact manager was an immense undertaking.

[crosstalk]

Rene: It would cost $30. It would crash when it launched, and it would crash when you closed it.

Matthew: Exactly. You had to give your credit card number to some crazy, random app-store thing on the Web. You never know what was going on with them and what you were going to get.

A lot of those lessons have been learned, so they're starting off in mach better place now with this first generation of wearable devices. Now, we are seeing the difference between something that's well executed...

Like a Fitbit, for instance. They execute really well. It's a nicely designed product. Almost nobody I talked to hates them. But I also talked to a lot of people who stopped using them. It falls off. Maybe it helps it helps them achieve some sort of awareness of food intake and activity, and then they develop a habit. It takes about six weeks, they get into this pattern, and now they don't need or use it anymore. They don't need it to remind themselves to exercise or whatever.

Some folks I've talked to have even said that it becomes a burden. You always have to remember it. You're always checking it. Then you start trying to please the machine instead of actually being healthier. You're just trying to feed it steps and arm motions and whatever it wants.

The FuelBand is funny that way. You've got a hand motion that doesn't attribute itself to cycling, for instance. There are a lot of weird things that are happening with wearables. They don't create a desire to continue using them. They don't create that feeling of, like this is improving my life, I need to have this, this is actually materially making things better for me.

I think that there are edge cases where that happens. A buddy of mine drives for a living. He's a sales guy and he drives for a living up and down the valley here. His Pebble is on his wrist all the time because he gets his texts and all that stuff, he doesn't have to look at his phone. His car doesn't have a fancy heads-up or anything that has text coming through on it. Instead he just twists his wrist and there it is.

That materially improves his life. Because he doesn't have to take his eyes of the road and it could improve his safety...

Rene: I have a friend who works in the hospital, the same thing. She can leave her phone in her office and just use a Pebble as she walks her rounds.

Matthew: Right. That's a whole another thing, because a lot of hospitals have rules against carrying phones and stuff. There are a lot of cases where something like a Pebble could be a real advantage.

But I think that those cases are too slim right now. What we need to see is somebody to make a pitch, let's call it a pitch. By pitch, I mean bring a product to market and explain this idea.

[crosstalk]

Rene: Like the iPhone when Steve Jobs made the case. That is has to exist between your phone and your laptop, it has to deserve to exist.

Matthew: Right. It's not just because we could fill a product category. I think that's why a lot of people misunderstand why Apple's not delivering like larger screened phones and stuff yet is there's definitely, they have the ability to do it and they could do it. Maybe they were just not seeing that people wanted them and they got surprised when people liked the Samsung stuff. I don't know. Maybe that's totally true.

But I think that there is a situation where you have to find the merit and then you have to deliver on it with whatever your given level of desire for polish is. The first Nest, for instance, I think that met their desired level of polish for a thermostat, but then the second one was a lot thinner. The joints were a little closer and a little finer tuned. All of that stuff was one step above the MVP.

But I think that the first one was very well done and it had a certain level of polish, but they could have gone 20, 30 percent worse than that first one and people still would have liked it.

I think that's the difference between a company like Apple or Nest or some of these other modern hardware companies that are developing stuff that's really neat and other companies is that they have the cojones to wait, to say, "We're going to not ship this until it gets to a certain level that we want." Whereas other companies will say, "Hey, let's just ship a bunch of stuff and see what people like."

I don't know that either one is evil. There's no black and white here about what's the better method. I think a lot of people will argue, like, I loved the fact that I could choose any screen size in a Samsung. I like their interface or whatever and I could choose from all of these 10 devices, and I think that's fine. But I think that focus also has a lot to do with it.

Bringing that back to the wearables thing, I think that if you end up in a scenario where you're shipping something in a wearable, you need to make sure that it's at a level of polish where it works absolutely wonderful, because it's even more so, it's under that same kind of scrutiny that we have with a smartphone. The tolerance is even smaller in something that we wear, even more than...

You've got the Mac at one end of the scale or a desktop computer at one end of the scale and then a smartphone at the other. Well, the wearable is even further along. It needs to be even tighter and even more refined.

Rene: That's actually interesting. If you look at something like, and I'll use just because they're easy, the iPhone or the iPad, they first came out, they were not the devices Apple wanted to deliver. They were the ones that they could realistically polish up to that level.

Then you have the 3G and the 4 eventually and you have the iPad 2 and the iPad Air which kind of fulfilled the original vision of those products. Arguably the dream and the magic, the same thing for Android when you get to the Nexus One and you start to see what they really wanted to do. Can people afford to do that in wearables, or because they're so small and so personal they have to take it to that next level of product sooner?

Matthew: If you look at the FuelBand, for instance, if you just pull that one out, the FuelBand is a pretty good product. I've used mine pretty heavily. I haven't worn it recently for a variety of reasons but I did wear it pretty heavily for a year or so. I think that it's a pretty good product. But they're on continuous hues. There are a couple of things that are interesting about it.

One, it's super thin and super light until you wear it a lot. Then it becomes heavy and bulky. It's one of those things where obviously you acclimated to having it on your wrist. But I think it's still bulkier than it needs to be. Not needs to be by engineering standpoints, because I know, I'm sure there are some very smart people working on it that made is thin as they could.

But I think that the tolerances, once again, are very small there for something that's really bulky on your wrist. The latch is really well-designed. It's metal and it's got this nice click when you close it. I'm actually opening it and closing it right now.

You end up with this situation where sometimes when you bang your wrist on something, because the latch is activated by inwards pressure from the outside, it pops it loose. I've literally been just walking around or whatever and all of a sudden the band is loose on my wrist and floating around.

That situation is just like a weird one. It's like I didn't unlatch this thing. It happened on its own. I think that some stuff like that, that might not be an enormous thing in another product like a bracelet or something like that, once you put $150 device on your wrist, you expect those things to be a little bit nicer, a little bit more thought out.

I think that this is one of those things where it's a company that has a lot of experience in wearables, so to speak. Nike's been building all kinds of wearable stuff for a long time, including "smart watches." Yet, they still have issues delivering a product that's really, really well done on all counts.

I think that the tolerances are going to be really, really tiny for anybody delivering any products from now forward. I think we're past the first flush of like, "Oh look, this is cool, I can wear it and it does stuff and it reminds me that I took so many steps," or whatever. I think we're well beyond that and I think whatever products get delivered from here on out are going to be pretty polished experiences to capture any meaningful share of a market.

Rene: Some people have asked or wondered out loud, our phones do so much now. For example, there's an M7 processor in the iPhone and you can get a Fitbit app. You can get @_DavidSmith's pedometer app. You can get a bunch of stuff that does a lot of what the dedicated wearable devices do. Since the phone is in your pocket already, do you really need a wearable to do it?

That leads into what you mentioned earlier with the contextual awareness and the sensors and things. Is there a possibility, for example...actually, let me break that down a little bit quicker.

I'm sure Apple is doing lots of fantastic things. I'm sure Google has a lot of plans. But they're not only thinking about the first release or the minimally viable product. They're thinking of the second, third, fourth generation. The stuff they're working on now, we might only see in a couple of years.

Is there still a case to be made for things like blood sugar reading or hydration level reading? Sticking your phone on your wrist is not the best solution, and there are better ways to deploy those sensors beyond the mobile phone.

Matthew: I think that's a very solid product argument for a wearable device is, what can it give us that the phone can't? The difference between something being in your pocketed and attached to your body can vary from use case to use case. It doesn't matter if you're getting a call on something that's attached to your wrist or in your pocket. That's not necessarily a big deal.

As I mentioned, there are some cases where it's helpful to know, so you don't even have to touch your phone, who's calling you and that sort of thing. But that particular interaction, it doesn't make an enormous difference whether it's something that's in your pocket or something that's on your body.

But there are other things where it does make an enormous difference. Like, what are the things that a device that's attached to your skin or touching your skin could tell you that a phone can't unless you're holding it?

The theory is you could put a heart rate monitor or a temperature sensor in a phone that could tell you about your body if you held it. But that will offer you a snapshot.

What the device that's on your wrist can do is it could provide you contextual information about your body, including things like heart rate monitoring and temperature sensing and blood sugar and all kinds of other interesting stuff. If it's attached to you, it's doing it on a continuous basis. It's providing you with a historical chart of that information.

That, to me, is interesting, because it's not really about, like what can you do, because you could go to the doctor and get your heart rate taken and your blood pressure taken and all that stuff. What happens when you're able to access it continuously and that information is able to be charted over time, historically, minute-to-minute? Then you end up in a scenario where you've got a chartable plot of data, and then you could compare it.

Once you've gotten a certain amount of historical data, then you could start comparing it against current data. That provides you with a differential, percentage of change or a change in data points.

Now, you're looking at not just what is happening to me right now, but what has happened to me, and then what may happen to me. Like you're on course to lose five pounds over the next month, or you're on course to gain two pounds over the next two weeks or whatever the case may be.

That kind of stuff I think offers people access to data passively. They don't have to think about it, they don't have to enter their weight into a chart or enter their heart rate into a chart or do all that stuff manually. Instead they can allow a device to gather it for them over time.

Then the key is you've got to deliver to them in a human way, which is sort of what Nike was trying to do with their Fuel, but I'm not really a fan of that. Because they take it and they boil it down into this Fuel number. That's not calories, it's not any particular measurement that mates up with traditional health measurements. It's its own thing, this count of Fuel.

But what they were trying to do is make it humane. You say like, "Look, here's Fuel. We're not going to put labels on it. We're going to tell you this," and then you could compare this against Fuel that you gain in the future, Fuel that you've gained in the past. Then it gets you an overall chart.

That's the key. It's got to be taking all these data points and then giving people actionable, human-parsable information that they can use to make their lives better.

I think that in that situation, having a device that's able to continuously monitor and continuously gather that information is very important, because it means that they can then provide you with very human, very parsable information about what the history of your health has been and where it might be going in the future. That proactive sense of what this contact is giving you and where it's going to lead you in the future I think is the selling point or the pitch for a device that's wearable.

That has to be the pitch. It can't just be, it tells you how many steps you've gone, because most people have no context to talk about that and think about that. What does it matter? Instead it's going to be how people delivering on gathering that information and then comparing it and then providing it to people in a very human, very understandable way.

Rene: Our every-cynical Internet is arguing that we...maybe not arguing but maybe asking if we as a society or as a culture care enough about our health to make this a compelling feature for us, or if we'd be more likely to buy it if it simply spat out McDonald's coupons?

Matthew: [laughs] That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know if people care enough about their health to do it. I have at certain times in my life cared more or less. Sometimes I'm running after my daughter and I'm out of breath and I'm like, oh, god, I need to get back to the gym. You'll come to moments of awareness like that. Then other times, you'll be scarfing down a double double and I don't care, [indecipherable 0:31:52] good.

Rene: I follow your Instagram feed. I know exactly how good it looks.

[laughter]

Matthew: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love food and I love eating and I don't like people reminding me all the time that what I'm eating isn't exactly super healthy. I don't know. It's going to be an interesting thing. I think that's part of the challenge is to say, look, everybody should care about their health in at least some fashion.

Balance is everything. I think a lot of people, especially on the Internet, value extremes. Like I would never or I would always. If you ever have read a single self-help book, it's like, "Never deal in absolutes because it'll disappoint you and destroy progress at all turns."

I think moderation is good for everything, but people have a hard time with that. Our nature is to be lustful after everything. Everybody loves to eat good food and loves to relax and loves to be hedonistic about things now and then. I'm not sure. I'm just not sure how the balance of people's lives and the way people think about their health, and we're all so busy. I'm not sure if we have room for that.

Rene: A depravity might sell better than a health band.

[laughter]

Matthew: Exactly. Yeah, the sloth band, the gluttony band. Maybe, and maybe that's the pitch. Maybe the pitch is everybody needs to think more about health. We know you don't have a lot of time or necessarily the knowledge to interpret the signals that your body is giving you and that your lifestyle is giving you, so let us do that. Let us come in for $150 or whatever the case may be, strap us onto your wrist and we will help you with all of that.

So that you could get about your busy life, get an update once a day or week or an hour or a month or whatever the case may be, that tells you, look, this is the way everything is going for you. These are some suggestions about the way you could change things to make it better.

Maybe that's the pitch. Maybe that is the key. Appealing to people's busyness and their lack of understanding and their lack of time. Really, it all comes down to time...

Rene: Or it's just the gym card membership. Everyone will buy it because it makes them think they're doing something, even if they use it or not.

Matthew: [laughs] Right. The gym business is enormous. People spend billions of dollars. It is very, very common that people buy gym memberships and keep them and don't cancel them simply based on wishful thinking. That's an enormous part of that. Gyms factor that into their profit margin. If we can get people to subscribe, then they'll never cancel because of what they wished they were doing, but not what they are doing.

Rene: The deadbeat customers for them are the ones that show up.

[laughter]

Matthew: Exactly. Those are the people they resent. They have to clean the machines. They add up to wear and tear on the facilities. Yeah, absolutely.

Rene: One of the things you mentioned earlier is the, that we're talking about the sensors. That part fascinates me because arguably microphones were dumb for a long time and then things like Siri and always-listening Google Now came up. Now, they're context-aware, they can do sequential inference, they can do all these things that make them more convenient.

We had cameras, but now we have Connect and maybe PrimeSense. Cameras can start to see who you are and how you're moving. The technology for wearables, maybe we had surfaces on all our devices but they were just surfaces and maybe now they'll be able to read and tell things about us. How important do you think that sort of awakening of turning components into part of the processing system is going to be for us?

Matthew: I think that's the lynchpin. I think you nailed it. That is exactly the building blocks that people are going to be using in the very near future to expand the way these devices work for us, or they're going to hope that's what they're going to do, anyway.

Really, in the end, everybody's just trying to sell more product. We can't attribute everything that they're doing, every technological advancement to some sense of altruism or advancement for humanity. But aside from the bottom line, let's just pretend for a minute.

I think that that's the theory behind all of these, this kind of next generation of advancements when it comes to contextual computing is that we're going to be able to use the sensors on our devices, which are getting more and more powerful and more accurate with every generation, to provide us with a deep amount of contextual information that we'll be able to use to make our devices more intuitive, more friendly, more proactive about the information that they give us.

I think that obviously Google's been doing that on the data side for a while with Google Now and I think they're doing an amazing job there. My Android device that I used is primarily a Gmail and Google Now machine. That's what it does. I prefer browsing on an iPhone simply because it's a better browser, for the most part. Chrome is decent but I still like the iOS browser and there are certain experiences, app experiences that you're only getting on iOS still.

But I think that there's just an immense amount of joy that I have from using, getting a notification from Google Now that anticipates my needs before I even...or I'm pulling up the phone to check and it's already there. That's great. It's just really, really a magical experience and great stuff, and stuff that only Google could do with their dataset.

Now, I think people are awakening to that. I think that it's going to become mandatory. I really don't think that contextual computing is something that's going to be the purview of one or two companies. I think literally every company that enters this space is going to have to investigate taking advantage of the sensors and the information gathered by sensors, and whatever user a data a user is willing to part with or share with them to provide them with that anticipatory computing experience.

It's table stakes now. This is not an option. I think something like Google Now, for instance, with Google, that's, they have a great fundamental building block of their next generation of mobile devices.

With Apple, I'm still waiting to see. They have some stuff, and I think they've be making a couple of small acquisitions that could help them in that space. The today section, you could easily imagine where that could be fleshed out with a lot of contextual signals, especially if you use iCloud or Apple's native mail app or anything where you're passing large amounts of data through it.

It doesn't have to be an Apple mail account. They've got the data natively on the device there so they have signals that they can use to help you flesh out that section. They don't do a whole lot with it now. I think that's probably because iOS 7 was the big rush to just ship, and that's fine. But I think that there's a lot they could do with that and will need to do with that.

I know Microsoft just cut a deal with Foursquare for a lot of their data. They're going beyond the APIs to go deeper into Foursquare's anticipatory stuff when it comes to location. Where exactly you are, why you might be there. Intent-based computing is huge.

Knowing why somebody is where they are or why somebody is trying to get somewhere will help a lot, I think. Will alleviate frustrations that people have with using their devices and provide moments where they can be delighted by stuff.

The sensors really are the hardware component to anticipatory computing, to the contextual-based computing. That's that software side of stuff. I think we're going to see insane advances, and sooner than you may think, when it comes to sensors. We know that Amazon's working on a device, a phone with several cameras. They're playing with that in the labs and trying to get that to a shippable state that can do some spatially aware stuff.

Then you've got companies that are like PrimeSense. Apple acquired PrimeSense obviously. A lot of those companies are built around sensors that can gather more than just visual information. They can gather spatial information and depth mapping. They can separate objects out from the environment and that sort of thing, so they could tell what's a room and what's in a room. Lots of indoor mapping stuff like that.

The major issue with a lot of those companies so far has been their power consumption. There's an enormous amount of power, in context, needed to run those devices. I mean they run off of USB, but we're talking like a full watt of power -- whereas you need a few milliwatts if you're going to be putting it on a mobile device with the batteries being in the state that they are now.

But I think those hurdles will get overcome. I think that people will find ways around that and fine ways to create technology that enables them to put those devices right into a mobile phone. Connect in a mobile phone, let's call it. I think we're going to see that stuff very soon. I think it's going to blow people's minds what it can do.

Now, where it goes from there, what experiences it provides and whether those are something that people quote-unquote need or want, I don't know. But I think that's the next big thing that everybody's going to be exploring. That's what I think this next 12 months or so is going to be about for a lot of these mobile device companies.

Rene: What's interesting too is if you start looking at the kinds of interfaces being built. Whether it's the car, like Google Now's implementation of cars, or iOS7 and the dynamic interface they're experimenting with and iOS in the car that can move it forth. It was bidirectional AirPlay, basically.

All the interfaces, I would go to the home screen, look for an icon, tap the icon, go to the home screen, look for a widget. I would always have to just pull process. I would have to go find the information. We're finally getting information that comes to us. If you can add context to that, the idea of push interface suddenly gets really interesting with that prescience that you mention.

Whether that card is coming up on my phone or if it knows I have a watch and that card is coming to my watch, it seems like we have the ability to take in that information, digest it, do something smart with it, but also we're getting the ability to give that back to us in a much more digestible form.

Matthew: Absolutely. I think a lot of that comes from the influence of apps. I think that the atomic units of information on the web were all over the place and still are. You don't know if it's going to be a feed or a stream or a module or an embed or a clip or whatever.

There are a lot of different atomic units of content on the web. I think that apps taught everybody that there could be a finite sort of module of content that your screen, your rectangular device screen could present you everything in one frame. I think Apple had a lot of influence there with the way that they developed UIkit and made the screen a frame in which to paint pixels.

Of course, there are a lot of apps that still use scrolling and feeds and stuff like that. But I think that they actually painted a very distinct image of what's possible on a device screen and that you can treat that like a discrete element.

I think that the cards fed off of that. A lot of these cards interface stuff feeds off of that. They provide a distinct atomic unit of content, of presentation, that we can look at. I think that there were examples of cards before apps really came about and stuff, but I think that it really took off from that. That people understood it. It's easily parsable.

You don't have to worry about there being anything you can't see. It's not this large window. If you've ever use a remote desktop client on an iPhone, for instance, you know there's more out there and you're scrolling around with your little finger trying to click the reboot button on your server or whatever the case may be.

That feeling doesn't exist with mobile apps. What you see it what you get. You've got a window and you're being presented with all of that content right there, and it feels very finite. I think cards tap into that same kind of thing.

I think they provide easily parsable units of information that we can get sent on various devices and they still maintain cohesiveness. You could look at that card, like a Twitter card on the Twitter feed of your desktop and look at it on your phone and it's roughly the same exact atomic unit of content. I think that's a powerful thing for web companies, but it's also better for humans, because the cognitive load is lessened and your framework is set so you don't have to worry about the interface as much. That fades out, and you could concentrate on the content rather than, where are the buttons and where's the stuff and am I seeing it all?

Rene: In all the movies that we used to watch, there was this idea of artificial intelligence where this machine would be very human-like. But what we're seeing with these sensors is they're not artificially intelligent. They're just well-informed.

They're getting more of the contextual data you spoke and they're handing that data off. Like an M7 chip can hand that data off to an app that does pedometry or something or a context-aware chip on a Moto X can hand that off to something that does natural language processing.

It's not the sort of scary Terminator coming to kill you sort of thing, it's this web of information that you can benefit from. It seems like the evolution is not the scary thing that we were afraid of, but much more of a, almost like a...I don't know what the right word is, but a very well-behaved butler who's just helping you through your day.

Matthew: I think that the guys that work on "Her" did a pretty good job of that stuff. Even if you just look at the trailer, you could see there's a vision there of computing that's significantly different than we may have come up with a few years back.

Let's go back to the "Star Trek" thing. They have the lapel buttons or the lapel pips or the broach for communication. The lapel pips I think were further on down the line in the timeline, but let's not go down the rabbit role too far. They have the broach that they could tap on.

But there's no discernable interface besides the action of tapping the button. It's all voice-activated. With that, they strip away all of the elements of interface and flash. In the same program, of course, though, they had the pads, which everybody likened to the iPad when it came out. Like, "Hey, look, there it is! This is our sci-fi tablet."

In a lot of ways, it is. That's exactly it. It's that thing where we all imagined that we would have something we would interact with and then we would tap on it and that would give us the information that we wanted at our fingertips. That's what we thought was the ultimate. Like, it's at our fingertips. How much better could it be?

I think that aspect of technology is...I don't think it's reached its nadir yet. I think my daughter will grow up with a large amount of touch interfaces in her life, still. I think those will be around for a long time and I think they haven't reached their peak, the top of their Big Mac curve.

Rene: The 5S and the Moto X are the worst phones she's ever going to know, Matthew.

[laughter]

Matthew: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think it's just going to get better there for her. But like in the movie "Her," most of the interfaces are not seen. Most of the technology is unseen. There are devices that are needed for inputs and to carry around the computing power necessary. But most of it is, it fades away.

That's the next thing beyond this current wave of writing. The current wave of writing is everything at your fingertips, interacting like a physical object would but on a screen. Then the next one is not interacting with an interface at all, erasing the interface completely and utilizing your normal human interactions to get what you need out of a computing device. We could spool that thread out a long ways.

But I think that's what I'm seeing here is that our current generation of stuff, there's still a long way to go, a lot of refinement to do. Until I get an iPhone that's as thin as an iPod Touch, I'm not going to be too happy. I still see that they've got room to grow there.

But out beyond that, I think that the next iteration is really going to be about technology fading away completely and offering us with just the information we need proactively. Saying, like, "Here's your appointments for the day. Here's how you get to where you need to go," without us having to go, "Hello, Google, how do I get where I need to go?" Not having to ask is the next step.

Rene: The obvious question then is how much...the price we pay for this is not really in money or time but in privacy. It's in getting past the idea that you control everything about yourself, because if you don't share that, you don't get the utility. That still seems to me like another part of the case that has to be made or another hurdle that has to overcome. I wonder if companies, if they'll be different cases.

For example, if Google can say, "We're giving you so much," or, "It's such a great experience, you're going to want to share your data with us." If a company like Apple can say, "We really want to make sure that you have the sense of privacy. We don't do as much as some other companies, but you can feel safe in what we do do." If there'll be different arguments that could be made around that.

Matthew: Obviously, privacy and security are never going to be too far away, once you start talking about any of this. Especially since we all became very well aware of how little privacy we actually do have. Most of us expected that or suspected that, for years, but now we know for sure, in many ways, that nothing we put online ever is ever completely private.

I think that's an interesting way to live. My daughter will grow up in a world where she assumes that nothing she puts online is ever private. I'll teach her that, because that's what I've always believed. I've tried never to really put anything online no matter how private it seemed. But yet, I still do financial transactions online and all that stuff, and that's there. I'm no fool. I know that all of that stuff could be hacked, could be accessed, given the proper tools or time.

But I think that we definitely are going to...we're just really new to this whole thing. I think it's going to be very, very difficult to reconcile what we're going to be getting from these companies versus what we're giving. Any reasonable thinking human...I don't really think that we are going to be...To ever really be able to get value out of a company like Google, that we'll match the value of the user data, of our digital souls that were giving them.

The question is really going to be how we can reconcile that. How we can say, "Look, I'm giving you way more than you're giving me, but I'm OK with that," I guess or I'm not.

Rene: The deal with the digital Devil.

Matthew: Yeah, exactly, and I think you're going to end up with a situation where there will be a major backlash against it. There already has been to the degree, but I think that what we're seeing right now is a lot of people are seeing it as the tech companies against the government and that they're on our side, so to speak.

I think we'll probably end up with a situation where, in a couple of years, there will be a significant amount of the populous that will have some sort of real aversion to that. I think we're already seeing some of it in this rise of ephemeral and similar private messaging services.

Consumer Internet is not always a direct indicator of what the public is thinking. Sometimes, it's just a fad. We'll have to ride this one out and see what Snapchat, and Whisper, and Secret, all this stuff is about.

I think that we walked into the Internet thinking that there was only one way to really do things.

Rene: We were naïve.

Matthew: Yeah, we were. That's not a bad. We were ignorant. Everybody was ignorant, really. Everybody was creating the rules as we went along. There wasn't really anybody to tell us otherwise.

I think we walked into this idea that everything we do online is permanent. Everything we do has to leave a trail and a record and will be parsed and used to service advertising, and all this stuff.

That's the Internet that we grew into. Maybe it's boiling the frog. Maybe we should have known sooner or should have reacted sooner and the Internet would be significantly different now. I don't think it would be as big. Now, we're seeing, I think, the early twinges of the next generation of people.

A lot of these apps are very popular with the young, like Snapchat, who are becoming cognizant of the fact that they don't want who they are, when they're 14, to be as easily accessible as who they will be when they're 25.

It's definitely an interesting point in the way the world is online. I think that big companies like Google and Apple, will have a lot of hard questions to ask about how they want to approach these things, what the value is that they're offering the user, what risks they're putting people at with how much data they do collect and keep.

I think that right now, Apple and Google have significantly different philosophies because Apple is a hardware company and does not need user data to make money. I mean credit cards are sure nice. That's user data.

Mailing addresses, and names, and credit cards are the backbone of iTunes. Apple has more payments power, nascent payments power than any other company in the world.

When they leverage that, they're sure going to love the fact that they have that user data. I don't care if they are making most of their money off of hardware. If they're able to become a payments processor and make the three percent that Visa's making, off of every transaction, all of a sudden that user data is very, very important to them.

I respect people at Apple. I know people that work there. I don't have any sense that there's any nefarious ways that they think about user data. I get the sense that they respect user data. Historically, they have because they don't make their money that way.

There are possibilities for their business, in the future, that do involve them utilizing some user provided information, voluntarily, provided information to make a lot of money.

Rene: Absolutely.

Matthew: Potentially even more than they make from an iPad or a Mac. Let's not talk about iPhones because they're just making so much money off of them now. It's definitely an interesting thing.

I'm not the kind of person that can ever look at Apple and go, "this company will never use user data," because A, they already do, in some ways, and then B, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing.

It's a morally tricky situation. I don't think Apple is going to be able to take the high road forever, in terms of, "Oh, we don't use user data," because they have said publicly we don't use data serve ads so we're essentially a better person than a company like Google is.

While I don't personally believe that, it doesn't matter really. That's the stance that they're taking because they sell hardware. I don't think that they're going to be able to maintain that position for long. Then you've got pretty much all the major companies win...

Excuse me, you've got all these major companies, almost all using user data to provide experiences, then you start asking those really hard questions about how much worth we're getting versus how much we're giving. I think it's going to be a very, very interesting series of questions to ask.

Rene: One of the other interesting things I want to pick up on that you said was you're going to have to explain this to your daughter, and it made me think of regardless of which company gets into wearables, right now Google glass is a niche product, Samsung galaxy gear is a niche product, the Pebble is a niche product, the iWatch doesn't really...No one's shown an iWatch off on stage yet, but if and when these products start becoming mainstream, the case is going to have to be made at retail, or in some way to consumers.

One of the things you mentioned previously was that the stores, the end points, whether it's an Apple retail store, or a big box store, or we know Samsung is trying to get into retail, and Google had some barges, I'm not sure what happened with those -- maybe Jaws.

But if they're going to require a way to make this stuff accessible, and understandable to the mainstream, and that may not be the old model where they just had computers on shelves.

Matthew: Yeah, absolutely. I think that Apple's decision to go after Angela Ahrendts, and hire her, has a lot to do with how they're going to be positioning themselves for the future, and unlike a lot of people, I think that some folks, when they write about the Ahrendts hire, are a little optimistic about how much input she's going to have in the product development process, that's just...

Rene: Yeah, they won't be any [indecipherable 0:58:26] iPhones.

Matthew: No, that's just not really how Apple works, but I'm sure she'll have input as at SVP, but I just don't think that it's going to be her in the lab with Jony Ive as much as people think.

Aside from that though, she's got a lot of qualifications that are just pure. She's a great CEO, she pioneered growth, she pioneered growth in China, she has a lot of great qualifications that are totally separate from Burberry, the fact that she was a CEO of a fashion company.

But let's put those aside and say, "OK, that's great." She would look great on paper regardless, but now you've got an additional layer of context when it comes to Apple and what they're selling. Over 50 percent of Apple's profits come from the iPhone now. Don't quote me on that, it's either profits or revenue, whatever. It's over 50 percent what they make...

Rene: They make a ton of money, a ton of their revenue.

Matthew: ...in general comes from...Yeah, the revenue is probably what I'm talking about, comes from the iPhone. Anyhow, they make an immense amount of money from the iPhone. The iPhone is a very personal computer, and I use that in the colloquial personal, not "PC, personal computer," but it's a computer that is personal to us. That is a very important factor when it comes to selling iPhones.

I think products like the iPhone and iPad, which make up the majority of Apple's sales now, have been adopted by the retail stores on the fly. They've bolted on the ability to sell those devices to consumers, to stores that, while great, and while they are wildly successful, and sell more per square foot than Tiffany's, they still were not designed to sell iPhones and iPads. They've undergone some revamps over the years.

The tables have got squarer, and the boxed accessories shelves have gotten smaller, or whatever the case may be, but there's never been a real rethinking of Apple's retail business centered around selling personal, with the lowercase P, computers. I think that selling the iPhone and iPad and selling, say an iWatch, are going to require different ways of thinking. Selling them into the future is going to require different ways of thinking about Apple's retail business.

I think that's one of the reasons that she was hired is because they...The computers that we're using now are extensions of ourselves, and they are very, very personal devices that we use, that we have in our pockets, that we touch, and hold, that we wake up and grab first thing in the morning, before anything else, before coffee, sometimes even before our glasses, and then we realize our mistake or whatever the case. We touch them constantly, we feel them, we hold them. They are an extension of us. People put skins on these, and cases, they want theming on them.

A lot of Android users love to theme and customize their devices because they feel it makes it more personal, and iPhones have famously had a very limited set of options for people wanting personalization, which is why the gold one is so popular, because everybody will know it's the new one, and it's different.

You get in this situation where perhaps people want these personal devices to be extensions of themselves, and to reflect their personality, and you need somebody that understands that in order to sell those devices. Yet, at the same time, you also need to have somebody that understands the value of a discrete, understandable brand identity, which Ahrendts did at Burberry very well, where they had a lot of copycat products on the market. She was able to clear a lot of that up and restore some prestige to the brand, and that sort of thing.

I think this definitely dovetails nicely with Apple's efforts to make their retail environment and their retail efforts more suited to selling personal computing devices like the iPhone, like the iPad, and like a wearable device such as the iWatch.

Rene: Is this something that's going to have to play out across the industry? We saw, I think Samsung bought Carphone Warehouse in the UK. I'm really hoping they by The Shack, because that place needs to change.

Do the companies that have these consumer-products, are they going to have to have one on one, face-to-face relationships, or do you think that enough of our consumer habits are moving on the web that...?

Retail might be fine for Apple, but a Google, or a Samsung, or a Lenovo, or a whomever, Microsoft, doesn't necessarily need that.

Matthew: That's a good question. I think there's a lot of people suited to answer that question better than me, but I'll take a little minor crack at it. You've got products that are very personal, very critical to our daily lives, and so I think there will be any need to have your hands on it, and have somebody to talk about it, and have that kind of face-to-face interaction.

I don't think that Google, for instance, could survive forever on selling online only Nexus devices, if they want to pursue that route. If they want to pursue direct sales, they're going to need a retail presence of some sort, at some point, before they turn that corner to really having a brisk retail business, if they decide to pursue that. They're in a really tricky situation when it comes to [indecipherable 1:04:02] partners, so we'll see how that plays out.

But if you've got companies like Samsung investing a lot of money in establishing retail environments, I think it's self-explanatory. Yes, they feel that is necessary. I feel that it's necessary as well.

If you have a device that you buy online, and you buy it because of reviews, or whatever the case may be, that's one thing. But being able to walk in and pick up a device, and use it, and hold it, is an enormous sales tool, even if you end up doing the final order online.

It's very, very difficult to describe some of the intangibles of [inaudible 1:04:41] it. I worked in retail for 10 years, and I sold...

Rene: Why I'm asking you. [laughs]

Matthew: ...digital cameras, and...Yeah, [laughs] yeah. It's hard to describe the difference between getting something online, and picking it up in a store, and having somebody there to just guide you through the process as long as they're a decent salesperson, and relatively knowledgeable. But it's very, very important, and it really makes a difference between a sale and not a sale a lot of times.

I think that's underestimated by a lot of people, because they see Amazon just owning these commodities markets. Why go to Target to buy toilet paper if it's the same price with free shipping at Amazon?

Rene: Yeah, your hundredth role of toilet paper is way different than your first.

Matthew: [laughs] Right, exactly, exactly. I think that that gets confused a lot with buying a phone, a very personal device.

I think that it's definitely something that all of these companies are going to have to look at and explore, and I think that it's questions Apple's going to have to answer about how it wants to change its retail business, if its primary business is going to be personal computers, with that lowercase P once again, like the iPhone.

I think it really needs to reevaluate how it sells those devices, and how it treats training, and sales, and all that stuff, and how it presents it in its environment. It's going to be an interesting time I think. I think she's going to have an interesting road ahead of her.

Rene: 2014 is going to be a hell of a year.

Matthew: [laughs] Yeah.

Rene: If people want to read more of your writing on this stuff Matt, or they want to follow you, where can they go?

Matthew: They can go to Techcrunch.com, I do write as much as I can, so they can read me there, or they can read all of the other lovely writers that we have on our staff.

Rene: The Twitter and the Instagram?

Matthew: Oh Twitter is Panzer, P-A-N-Z-E-R, and Instagram, if you want to look at food, is MPanzarino.

Rene: There are a couple of cute daughter pictures once in a while.

Matthew: Yes, yes, also my very lovely daughter.

Rene: All right, Matthew, thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining us.

Matthew: Thank you, sir. I appreciate you having me.

Rene: That was awesome.

Chris Umiastowski, former sell-side analyst, talks to Rene about the state of the mobile market, including what led BlackBerry to the brink of sale.

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• Chris Umiastowski on CrackBerry
• Chris Umiastowski on iMore

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• Chris Umiastowski

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• Rene Ritchie of iMore.com

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Tim Stevens, star of auto and gadget blogs, joins Rene to talk about the computerization of cars, including launch controls, self-driving vehicles, Sync, QNX, and iOS in the Car, and the explosive potential of hacking engines.

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• 2013 Ferrari FF: The Jalopnik Review
• Lexus' autonomous Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle and why we're not ready for self-driving cars
• Nissan NSC-2015 self-driving car with LTE and smartphone connectivity (test-ride with video)
• QNX unveils new Bentley Continental GT concept car
• iOS in the Car

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• Tim Stevens of Digital Displacement

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Guy English of Aged & Distilled and Kickingbear joins Rene to talk about the new Mac Pro, what those dual graphics cards means for Apple, for developers, and for end users, and for the ongoing move from power to empowering.

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• The New Mac Pro
• Apple Mac Pro page
• iMore Mac Pro page
• Power users vs. empowered users

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• Guy English of Kickingbear

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